When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Trump will be subject to Twitter’s normal rules after he leaves office, Democrats and disinformation experts breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the era of Trump’s social media impunity will come to an end.
According to Dorsey, Twitter’s public interest exception, which lets public officials’ rule-breaking tweets stay up with labels and exempts their accounts from suspension, will lapse the moment he stops being president. So @realDonaldTrump will definitely be just like any other account and liable for lockouts and suspension if it breaks the rules, right?
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Well, maybe. Those concerned about the soon-to-be former president’s misinformation megaphone poisoning social media with more election conspiracies might not want to celebrate quite yet because Trump’s reported desire to run again in 2024 makes it unclear when his account will lose the shield of that public interest exception.
Trump, associates are now telling reporters, is intent on running for president again in 2024 and could declare his candidacy as early as Joe Biden’s inauguration day. And Twitter’s public interest exception applies not just to office holders but to candidates, too. A candidate Trump is entitled to the same exception as a President Trump. But determining when Trump—or anyone else—becomes a candidate for president in the eyes of Twitter is tricky because the company hasn’t made clear what threshold it uses for considering an account holder a candidate (the company declined to provide an answer when asked by The Daily Beast).
In the absence of official guidance, there are a few likely procedural steps which could serve as guideposts for considering but they vary widely as to when Trump could cross them—meaning the former president could be subject to the rules for anywhere between minutes and years after Biden takes the oath of office.
BASICS. Simply declaring oneself a candidate to the world seems an unlikely threshold for the company to let users qualify for a public interest exception—it’s just too easy, and there’s no official imprimatur.
The first and fastest official step to becoming a candidate in the eyes of the federal government is filling out FEC Form 2, a statement of candidacy. If Twitter uses Form 2 as its candidacy threshold, Trump’s account could qualify for the public interest exception as early as inauguration day—in 2017, Trump filed his 2020 FEC Form 2 just hours after taking the oath of office.
If that’s the case, Trump could enjoy a virtually seamless transition from the protections of the public interest exception as he goes from former president to current candidate.
But Twitter could choose to raise the bar for a presidential candidacy higher if they wanted. FEC Form 2, while an official declaration of candidacy, is a relatively trivial hurdle to jump and could invite habitual trolls looking to shield their accounts with potemkin filings.
PRIMARY COLOR. The next step a candidate looking to run for president as the nominee of a party needs to go through is getting their name on a primary ballot. As a former president beloved of his party’s base, Trump could sail onto a Republican primary ballot with ease—but only after some time. State parties haven’t even set the dates of their 2024 primaries yet and won’t start accepting applications for a ballot for three years.
And three years is a lot of time for an aggrieved Donald Trump’s busy thumbs and big mouth to get him in trouble with Twitter’s terms of service. A sole errant tweet on inauguration day wouldn’t land him a suspension. Like any other account, Trump would have to accrue a series of offenses of sufficient gravity, as interpreted by Twitter, and ignore repeated warnings from the company in order to get to the point where his account became eligible for suspension.
But Trump hasn’t yet shown any sign of being able to accommodate the reality of his loss or wean himself off his followers’ various conspiracy theories. Once out of the White House, the circle of advisors and staff who might otherwise try, however much in vain, to talk him out of unwise tweets will shrink, too—meaning he’s only more likely to post content that violates the companies rules, whether he qualifies for an exception or not.
REAL TALK. Lest you doubt that Twitter would stick to its guns, there is some precedent for the company booting a candidate once entitled to the public interest exception after their candidacy has ended. Twitter suspended DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, a MAGA relationship expert who ran a failed bid to unseat Nancy Pelosi, for her racist tweets last month.
And once you’re gone, you’re gone for good. There’s no chance that a new candidacy could resurrect his old account or allow him to register another one.
We know this because the MAGA-verse—a never ending source of social media moderation precedents—has already forced a ruling from Twitter.
Florida conspiracy theorist and far-right activist Laura Loomer managed to get herself banned from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, PayPal and even Uber Eats after a string of racist utterances and bizarre behavior. Loomer, who once chained herself to Twitter’s headquarters in a bid to get her account back, ran a doomed bid for Congress in Florida this year but Twitter nonetheless said it wouldn’t allow the newly anointed GOP candidate to open an account.
FACE OFF. That still leaves Facebook as a potential haven for Trump. The outgoing president has a personal account there and it’s gotten him into trouble before when the company removed posts spouting misinformation about the coronavirus. But Trump isn’t much of a Facebook user and to the extent he does use it—and run afoul of its policies—his Facebook content consists mostly of tweets copied from his Twitter account and videos of his appearances on TV.
Like Twitter, Facebook carves out a “newsworthiness” exception for public officials and candidates but who it applies to and how it applies is even murkier and more subjective. (Facebook did not respond to questions from The Daily Beast about its threshold for defining a candidate under its exception policy.)
But there are reasons to believe that Facebook would likely be more accommodating to Trump in a post-presidency period, as it has during and before his term in office.
According to the Washington Post, Facebook’s exception policies were practically designed around Trump when the company faced a dilemma over what to do about a post from the then-candidate advocating for a “Muslim ban” in 2015. Facebook allowed the post to stay up under an improvised exception for newsworthy content, which informed Facebook’s declaration of a “newsworthiness exception” in 2016.
But even with the kid gloves treatment, Twitter remains Trump’s first and true love, the platform which launched his career in politics and which gives him the rally-esque mass audience and media attention he craves. The question is whether he can summon the self-discipline to holster his thumbs until he has another shot at posting impunity—however long that takes.
