Twitter Locks Trump Campaign Account

Twitter temporarily suspended the account of the president of the United States’ election campaign for “posting private information.”

The account @TeamTrump was locked for attempting to tweet a video referencing a recent article by the New York Post along with text describing presidential candidate Joe Biden as “a liar who has been ripping off our country for years.”

The New York Post article published leaked emails that suggest that in 2015, while working for Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, Biden’s son Hunter arranged for the then Vice President Joe Biden to meet with a top executive at the company.

The emails were found on a hard drive that was dropped off at a repair shop in 2019 and never collected. The drive was later placed into the hands of Robert Costello, a lawyer for Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

When the Trump campaign tried to post the tweet, Twitter suspended its account for “violating our rules against posting private information.” The suspension was carried out before the veracity of the article had been fact-checked. 

Joe Biden’s campaign has not ruled out the possibility that a meeting took place between Biden and an executive at Burisma Holdings, stating only that no record of the meeting could be found in Biden’s “official schedules.” 

The suspension occurred on the same day that the social media giant censored the Post‘s primary Twitter account for posting the Hunter Biden story.  Twitter also blocked numerous other user accounts for tweeting links to the Post’s Hunter Biden story for containing what it described as “hacked material.”

On Wednesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged “our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”

Twitter’s enforcement of its policy to suspend accounts for posting an individual’s leaked private information without their consent carries a distinct air of political partisanship. The social media platform took no steps to lock or suspend the account of Buzzfeed for its reporting of the Steele Dossier or the account of the New York Times when it tweeted an article referencing leaked tax-return data belonging to President Trump.