Politico: National Archives can’t resurrect Trump’s tweets, Twitter says. “Twitter will not allow the National Archives to make former President Donald Trump’s past tweets from his @realDonaldTrump account available on the social media platform, the company told POLITICO on Wednesday, in the latest display of Silicon Valley’s power over communications channels used by the U.S. government.”
BBC: Facebook bans ‘voice of Trump’ from platform. “Facebook has removed a video of former US President Donald Trump from the page of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump. The social media giant banned Mr Trump from its platform in January following riots by his supporters on the Capitol building in Washington. Lara Trump, a new Fox News contributor, posted a video of herself interviewing Mr Trump on a range of issues.”
AP: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago partially closed due to COVID outbreak. “Former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, club has been partially closed because of a COVID-19 outbreak. That’s according to several people familiar with the situation, including a club member who received a phone call informing them about the closure Friday. A receptionist at the Mar-a-Lago club confirmed the news, saying it was closed until further notice, but declined to comment further.”
ABC News: Trump’s ‘Chinese Virus’ tweet helped lead to rise in racist anti-Asian Twitter content: Study. “A new study suggests that former President Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric around the coronavirus, which is believed to have originated in China, helped spark anti-Asian Twitter content and ‘likely perpetuated racist attitudes.’”
Texas Tribune: Twitter sues Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, asks court to halt his investigation of the social media company. “Beleaguered Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who attended the pro-Donald Trump rally that preceded the U.S. Capitol siege, issued civil investigative demands to Twitter after the company banned the former president from its platform.”
Mashable: How Facebook, Twitter, YouTube reacted to big events in 2020, including Trump’s many lies. “The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit which advocates for a secure, open internet that supports democracy, has released an interactive timeline that shows the misinformation policy changes online platforms made before, during, and after the 2020 election, and how those actions intersect with major political and cultural events that spurred misinformation. Mozilla is most widely known for its Firefox browser, but the nonprofit also tracks online misinformation in an effort to improve tech policies.”
PsyPost: New study sheds light on the complicated relationship between Trump support and the COVID-19 pandemic. “Donald Trump appears to have benefited from a rally-round-the-flag effect among Republicans concerned with COVID-19 during the early stages of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the United States, according to new research published in PLOS One. But this effect had reversed itself just a few months later.”
NBC News: Trump, former first lady quietly received Covid vaccine in January. “Former President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump quietly received the Covid-19 vaccine at the White House in January, a Trump advisor told NBC News on Monday. It is not clear which type of vaccine they received and they were not disclosed at the time by the Trump White House.”
PsyPost: Coronavirus shelter-in-place orders were less effective in states with a greater share of Trump voters. “A new study that examined anonymous cell phone tracking data shows that shelter-in-place orders worked better in some regions of the United States than others. The findings, which appear in PLOS One, suggest that political partisanship and other factors played an important role.”
EurekAlert: Public attitudes about COVID-19 in response to President Trump’s social media posts. “Researchers used near real-time social media data to capture the public’s changing COVID-19-related attitudes when former President Trump was infected.”
The Markup: Trump’s False Posts Were Treated with Kid Gloves by Facebook. “Overall, we gathered Facebook feed data from more than 2,200 people and examined how often those users saw flagged posts on the platform in December and January. We found more than 330 users in the sample who saw posts that were flagged because they were false, devoid of context, or related to an especially controversial issue, like the presidential election. But Facebook and its partners used the ‘false’ label sparingly—only 12 times.”
PsyPost: Republicans tend to follow Donald Trump’s opinions on vaccines rather than scientists’ opinions. “When it comes to the false claim that vaccines cause autism, Republicans tend to be more swayed by Donald Trump than scientists, according to new research published in the journal Health Communication. The study indicates that politicians can have a significant influence on citizens’ science beliefs.”
CNET: Facebook’s oversight board asks for public comment on Trump case. “Facebook’s content oversight board is accepting public comment on the social network’s decision to indefinitely bar Donald Trump from posting to his account because of concerns the now-former president could incite violence like the Jan. 6 insurrection at Capitol Hill.”
Tubefilter: Insights: The Donald’s Digital Death Penalty—Deplatforming, Politics, And The Future Of Social Media. “When Twitter pulled the plug on @POTUS, it was both refreshing for my exhausted adrenal system and, in more substantive ways ways, deeply thought-provoking in its long-term implications for social media companies and their increasingly fraught relationships with politicians–and, not incidentally, all the rest of us. That’s because it wasn’t just Twitter that finally dropped the digital death penalty, or at least a temporary Cone of Silence that may become more permanent, on the now former president and newly installed Emperor of Mar-a-Lago.”
New York Times: Inside Twitter’s Decision to Cut Off Trump. “Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, was working remotely on a private island in French Polynesia frequented by celebrities escaping the paparazzi when a phone call interrupted him on Jan. 6. On the line was Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and safety expert, with an update from the real world.”
