Twitter Just Slapped Trump With A Content Warning For “Glorifying Violence”

Twitter has flagged a tweet by Donald Trump with a “public interest notice” after the president violated the platform’s rules on violence.

For context, thousands of Americans are currently protesting for the Black Lives Matter after yet another person of colour died as a result of police brutality in Minnesota this week. It’s really important stuff and you can read more about it here.

But in response, the literal president of the United States, Donald Trump, took to Twitter to announce that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

The tweet has since been flagged because it “violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence.” But in the interest of the general public, they have chosen not to remove it from the platform.

They also followed up with a Twitter thread explaining their reasoning for flagging the tweet.

“This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today,” the thread read.

“We’ve taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance.”

In addition to flagging the tweet, Twitter has also removed the “like” and “reply” functions, but you can still retweet it with a comment.

Earlier this week, Twitter made history by flagging two election-related tweets from the president, alerting users that the content could be potentially misleading and linking them to a Twitter “moment” explaining postal voting.

The most recent violation comes after Trump signed an executive order in an attempt to minimise the legal protections that websites like Twitter currently hold. To put it simply, he doesn’t want to be censored.

As it currently stands, Twitter usually tries to label these sorts of rule-violating tweets from political leaders, rather than deleting them. So Trump isn’t even really being censored, he is just followed by a big asterisk that says “Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”