Twitter, Facebook, Instagram lock Trump out of his account; block #StormTheCapitol hashtag comments

Social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have locked out the US President, Donald Trump out of his account due to his incendiary comments concerning the US Capitol storming by supporting rioters to block Biden’s win.

Early in the day, Trump supporters stormed the the United States Capitol, the meeting place of the United States Congress and the seat of the legislative branch of the U.S. federal government to to reject the results of the Nov. 3 election in which Vice President Joe Biden emerged as the President Elect of the country.

Twitter first locked the President out of his @realDonaldTrump account for 12 hours after three tweets posted for repeated and severe violations of its Civic Integrity policy. The social media platform stated if the tweets were not removed, the account will remain locked.

Facebook also said that the President’s page violated its policy “which will result in a 24-hour feature block, meaning he will lose the ability to post on the platform during that time”

Some minutes later, Adam Mosseri Head of Instagram, tweeted that the platform was also locking President Trump’s Instagram account for 24 hours.

Guy Rosen, Facebook VP, Integrity, and Monika Bickert, VP, Global Policy Management posted the company’s response to the Violence in Washington saying:

Let us speak for the leadership team in saying what so many of us are feeling. We are appalled by the violence at the Capitol today. We are treating these events as an emergency. Our Elections Operations Center has already been active in anticipation of the Georgia elections and the vote by Congress to certify the election, and we are monitoring activity on our platform in real time. For those of you who are wondering, here are the actions we’re taking:

First, we have been searching for and removing the following content:

• Praise and support of the storming of the US Capitol
• Calls to bring weapons to locations across the US — not just in Washington but anywhere in the US — including protests 
• Incitement or encouragement of the events at the Capitol, including videos and photos from the protestors. At this point they represent promotion of criminal activity which violates our policies.
• Calls for protests — even peaceful ones — if they violate the curfew in DC 
• Attempts to restage violence tomorrow or in the coming days

As a part of this, we removed from Facebook and Instagram the recent video of President Trump speaking about the protests and his subsequent post about the election results. We made the decision that on balance these posts contribute to, rather than diminish, the risk of ongoing violence.

In line with the above, Facebook and Instagram have also started blocking content posted to the #StormTheCapitol hashtag.