Name: Is Trump’s Social Media Firewall Starting to Crumble?
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Is Trump’s Social Media Firewall Starting to Crumble?

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Snapchat, a multimedia-sharing and messaging app, instated a new policy on Wednesday officially distancing itself from Donald Trump’s incitement of “racial violence.” The social media company announced that the president’s account will no longer appear on its Discover timeline, a feature that promotes posts from notable accounts that a user doesn’t follow but may be interested in. Going forward, people who don’t subscribe to Trump's Snapchat won’t involuntarily see what he posts. The move came after Twitter, the White House’s go-to communication and messaging tool, added a disclaimer to one of the president’s tweets last Friday, ruling that it promoted gratuitous violence—in this case against people protesting the police killing of an unarmed black man.The app’s parent company, Snap, released a explaining the decision. “We will not amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover,” it read. “Racial violence and injustice have no place in our society, and we stand together with all who seek peace, love, equality, and justice in America.” Snapchat is nowhere near the digital war zones that Facebook and Twitter have become, as many of its 360 million active, mostly young users use the app to share their day-to-day activities in snippets that disappear after 24 hours. The app’s relatively apolitical reputation has contributed to Evan Spiegel, Snap’s cofounder and CEO, having nowhere near the name recognition that public faces of competing companies do. This, in turn, has helped him evade the infamy that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have earned. However, following ongoing nationwide protests against systemic racism, Spiegel shared his most overtly political statement to date. In a company over the weekend, the 30-year-old CEO warned that “the American experiment is failing,” advocated for slavery reparations, and called for increased taxes on the rich.The president was not mentioned or alluded to once in the 2,000-word write-up, but Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, has still condemned “Radical Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.” “Snapchat is trying to rig the 2020 election, illegally using their corporate funding to promote Joe Biden and suppress President Trump,” Parscale in a statement responding to Snapchat’s removal of Trump from its Discover tab. “Snapchat hates that so many of their users watch the President’s content and so they are actively engaging in voter suppression. If you’re a conservative, they do not want to hear from you, they do not want you to vote. They view you as a deplorable and they do not want you to exist on their platform.”The Snapchat standoff represents Trumpworld’s most recent clash with social media companies. But the conflicts have been ongoing, particularly since the president came out vocally against police-brutality protesters. Last week Twitter added to his threats against looting “THUGS” and added a fact-check label to his tweets claiming that mail-in ballots boost voter fraud. Neither step made the tweets inaccessible; rather, users simply had to click through the former post’s warning to read it. “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence,” the site warned, a stipulation that remains at the bottom of Trump’s tweet even after users agree to view it. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”Still, these moves mark unprecedented disciplinary action toward the site’s most important user, and have been a long time coming for those lobbying the company to step in as he has spread racism, conspiracy theories, and calls for violence. Trump has in return: Demanding “FAIRNESS” from Twitter, the president signed an executive order last Thursday requiring social media sites to act in “good faith” when it comes to measures like hiding and fact-checking posts or banning its users. If platforms fail to live up to his vague, FCC-enforced standard, they can now risk losing the protections offered to them by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from being sued over content shared by users. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram—the number one and number two most popular social platforms in the U.S., respectively—have avoided censoring the president’s recent posts in any way.More Great Stories From Vanity Fair— Trump Whines About His as Campaign Flails— In Photos: in Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and More— James Clyburn on the Floyd Killing and the — While Covering America’s Unraveling— Documents Expose FDA Commissioner’s Personal Interventions on Behalf of — Why Trump’s New Campaign Slogan, Sends a Disastrous Message— From the Archive: in a Brooklyn Precinct Once Nicknamed Fort TombstoneLooking for more? for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.Most Popular is a staff reporter at Vanity Fair based in Washington, D.C. He has been covering media and politics since 2016, previously writing for USA Today and Mediaite before joining V.F. in 2020. A dual citizen of the U.S. and the Philippines who hails from rural South Carolina, he... 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Snapchat, a multimedia-sharing and messaging app, instated a new policy on Wednesday officially distancing itself from Donald Trump’s incitement of “racial violence.” The social media company announced that the president’s account will no longer appear on its Discover timeline, a feature that promotes posts from notable accounts that a user doesn’t follow but may be interested in. Going forward, people who don’t subscribe to Trump's Snapchat won’t involuntarily see what he posts. The move came after Twitter, the White House’s go-to communication and messaging tool, added a disclaimer to one...

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Caleb Ecarma

Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

Is Trump’s Social Media Firewall Starting to Crumble?

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