Twitter announced on Jan. 8 that it is permanently suspending the personal Twitter account of Donald Trump after concluding that the US president’s tweeting posed a “risk of further incitement of violence.”
The official presidential account @POTUS remains active, though unlike his predecessor, Trump rarely posted to it. He was able to post some tweets to it after the suspension, but they have since been removed.
Twitter told NPR that if Trump starts using another account to evade the ban, that account will be subject to suspension.
Donald Trump’s Tweets have now disappeared from Twitter
The suspension means that Trump’s tens of thousands of prior tweets are out of public view on Twitter. Retweets of the president’s messages are gone from the forwarding user’s timelines, and quote tweets are replaced with the message “This Tweet is unavailable.”
The ability to navigate other users’ likes, retweets, and quotes of the president’s tweets is gone, as is the ability to see, in one place, all replies to anything he has tweeted.
How to read Donald Trump’s tweets now
Archives of Trump’s tweets exist both privately and publicly, even though compiling such repositories can run afoul of Twitter’s terms of service. Nonetheless, at least some of the president’s tweets are subject to the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of their content.
The Trump Twitter Archive is an effort created by a sole developer who says he wanted “to provide a public resource.” It allows users to search through more than 56,000 tweets posted to the account between 2009 and today.
The archive allows you to filter tweets by date and the device used. It has even archived the tweets the Trump posted and then later deleted, starting in September 2016.
Other suspensions of Donald Trump by social media companies
The move by Twitter follows the temporary suspension of Trump’s Facebook page and YouTube channel, and the permanent suspension of unofficial Reddit pages set up by his supporters. Apple has given Parler—a Twitter alternative favored by the right-wing—a 24-hour ultimatum to better moderate the content posted by its users or face a ban from the Apple App Store. Google suspended the Parler app from the Google Play store.
All of the companies note that the president and his supporters have violated their platforms’ polices by making posts that promote or coordinate violence.
