pre-ban

Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter permanently banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers.For most of Trump's presidency, his account on Twitter, where he often posted controversial and false statements, remained unmoderated in the name of "public interest". Congress performed its own form of moderation: on July 16, 2019, the House of Representatives voted mostly along party lines to censure him for "racist comments" he had tweeted two days previously. In the face of this political censure, his tweets only accelerated. An investigation by The New York Times published November 2, 2019, found that, during his time in office to date, Trump had already retweeted at least 145 accounts that "have pushed conspiracy or fringe content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended." In 2020, Trump also spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.
During his 2020 reelection campaign, he falsely suggested that postal voting or electoral fraud may compromise the election, prompting Twitter to either remove such tweets or label them as disputed. After his election loss, Trump persistently undermined the election results in the weeks leading to Joe Biden's inauguration. His tweets played a role in inciting the January 6, 2021, attack of the U.S. Capitol during the formal counting of electoral votes. Though the Senate eventually acquitted Trump during his second impeachment, social media companies swiftly banned him. Facebook and Instagram announced a permanent ban (although, in June 2021, they said they would revisit the ban in January 2023). Twitter permanently suspended his @realDonaldTrump handle, followed by the official account of his campaign (@TeamTrump) and the accounts of allies who posted on his behalf, like Trump campaign digital director Gary Coby. Twitter also deleted three tweets by Trump on the @POTUS handle and barred access to the presidential account until Joe Biden's inauguration. During the first week that Trump was banned on several platforms (January 9–15), election-related misinformation declined 73%, according to research analytics firm Zignal Labs.In October 2021, it was announced that a new social media app called Truth Social was to be run by Trump Media & Technology Group. The platform was slated to launch in 2022.From June 2021, Trump's spokesperson Liz Harrington has tweeted screenshots of his messages under the Save America logo.

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