In a blog post last week, Twitter finally responded to the growing concerns about Trump’s seeming carte blanche to send whatever messages he wants on the service, regardless of whether or not any of his tweets break the service’s rules. Basically, Twitter decided that we’re all better off if world leaders are able to express themselves freely on the platform and confirmed that it has no plans to ban the president or take down his most controversial tweets.
While some of the platitudes in Twitter’s blog post failed to ring true, the explanation made sense. That aside, Twitter can run its business any way it wants. But as much sense as it made, the explanation was still a bit lacking, which is why Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s VP in Europe, followed up on the post in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live.
“If someone tweets private information, if someone tweets someone’s private address, phone number, then they are no-go areas where we don’t permit that,” said Daisley in the interview when asked about exactly what the company would consider to be serious. “So in those instances, what we often say is we ask for that tweet to be removed. So look, were he to do that, just picking a hypothetical example, then you know, those would be areas.”
What Daisley seems to be saying is that if Trump were to dox a private citizen, Twitter would ask him to take it down. It’s unclear if the company would actually take any action if Trump were to refuse to take down the tweet though, so this honestly raises more questions than it answers. The way things are going though, there’s a decent chance we’ll find out what happens when the president decides to tweet someone’s private address sooner than later.
