In a statement shared with Politico, Twitter says it won’t allow the National Archives to make tweets Donald Trump sent from his @realDonaldTrump account as president available for people to see and interact with on its platform. The company permanently suspended the former president following the January 6th US Capitol insurrection, a ban Trump has tried and failed to bypass. The decision comes as the National Archives works to create an online record of Trump’s Twitter missives, something it has already done with the accounts of other officials from the previous administration. Those archives allow you to like and share those tweets.
“Given that we permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump, the content from the account will not appear on Twitter as it did previously or as archived administration accounts do currently, regardless of how NARA decides to display the data it has preserved,” a spokesperson for Twitter told Politico. “Administration accounts that are archived on the service are accounts that were not in violation of the Twitter Rules.”
To be clear, that doesn’t mean there won’t be an official archive of Trump’s tweets. Instead, you’ll have to view them on the Presidential Library website. What’s more, the database the National Archives and Records Administration is creating will include all of the more than 26,000 messages Trump sent out as president, including the ones Twitter labeled and deleted. However, that does mean that there isn’t an official record of those messages just yet — though it is possible to find them elsewhere.
The subject of Twitter’s actions against Trump has been a divisive issue ever since the company first banned him, and that’s likely to continue to be the case. Earlier in the week, the US Supreme Court vacated a ruling that had prevented Trump from blocking people through his personal account. In his 12-page opinion on the ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas said it was unprecedented for companies like Twitter to hold “concentrated control of so much speech,”