Snapchat will permanently ban President Trump’s account on Jan. 20, Axios has learned, after it was indefinitely locked last week following the siege of the Capitol.
Why it matters: The Trump campaign and digital team relied on Snapchat as an important platform to reach a younger audience before the company started limiting its reach in June. Majority of Snapchat users are under the age of 30.
What is going on: “Last week, we announced an indefinite suspension of President Trump’s Snapchat account and investigated what long-term action is in the best interest of our Snapchat community,” a spokesman emailed Axios.
- “In the interest of public safety and based on his efforts to spread disinformation, hate speech and incitement to violence, which are clear violations of our guidelines, we have decided to permanently terminate his account.”
Details: Trump’s account has repeatedly broken Snapchat’s rules in recent months against misinformation, hate speech and glorifying or inciting violence, company sources say.
- A source tells Axios that the Trump account has tried to violate policy ‘dozens of times’. After each incident, Snapchat immediately deleted its content before it gained much visibility and alerted its team.
- However, the move was triggered not only by actions on Snapchat, but also by Trump’s track record of inciting violence on other platforms, company sources say. Snapchat leaders considered banning Trump a matter of broad public safety.
Flashback: Citing the social effects of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, Snapchat stopped promoting its account in the “Discover” section in June, which features professional content and content from prominent people.
- That preemptive action meant that Trump’s account was not visible to Snapchat users unless they chose to subscribe or search for him.
The big picture: Snapchat is following Twitter, Shopify, and a few other platforms in permanently banning Donald Trump’s account after last week’s events.
- Last week, Snapchat was the first platform to announce it was indefinitely suspending Trump’s account. Many other platforms have temporarily limited his account.
Be smart: Snapchat has been able to avoid most of the regulatory and industry pressure around misinformation, in part because it has stricter standards for how it implies.
- The app does not have a public news feed to allow unscreened content to go viral and keeps user-generated content physically separate from the professional, vetted content in Snapchat’s Discover section.
- Snapchat also routinely blocks certain keywords, such as ‘Stop the Steal’, so that they don’t appear in the search bar.
What to watch: The siege of the Capitol has already begun to spark a conversation about how social media platforms are structured and controlled.
- While Snapchat is smaller than platforms such as Facebook and Google, its architecture has proven to be effective, both at mitigating disinformation at scale and at preventing bad actors from converging and planning real violence.
Go deeper: Snapchat locks down Trump’s account amid chaos in Washington