President Donald Trump tweets like no politician ever has before, using the service at times to attack political adversaries, threaten other countries and routinely bash the media.
Twitter says President Trump has to play by the same abuse rules as everyone
“The rules are the rules, we enforce them the same way for everybody.”
Michael Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images
Some have called for Twitter to ban the president for his tweets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, on the other hand, has said on multiple occasions that having Trump on the platform is “really important.”
So when Twitter brought a group of journalists to its San Francisco headquarters this week to discuss the company’s progress on stopping abuse, we asked Twitter’s VP of Trust and Safety Del Harvey: Can you really treat the president’s Twitter account the same way you treat everybody else’s?
Harvey first said she couldn’t talk about individual accounts or hypotheticals. Then she added: “We apply our policies consistently. We have processes in place to deal with whomever the person may be, we try to be as consistent as possible, as scalable as possible, and there’s always all sorts of context and other things that come into play that make it impossible to comment on hypotheticals as is.”
“The rules are the rules, we enforce them the same way for everybody,” she added.
That answer probably won’t satisfy Trump’s opponents. But abuse and harassment can be, at times, a subjective thing. For example, when Trump tweeted out a video of himself body-slamming a person with the CNN logo edited onto their face, was that just a harmless joke? Or a violent threat to the media?
Twitter clearly took it as a joke. Making threats of violence is against the Twitter rules.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
