Protestors just demanded that Twitter stop enabling Trump with a message they can’t ignore

Tech-savvy activist protestors in San Francisco, angered over the saber-rattling nuclear tweet that President Trump sent out yesterday, turned their ire towards the President’s primary weapon of words by staging a demonstration targeting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last night.

Resist SF used multi-media methods to denounce what they called enabling behavior by Twitter in continuing to allow Trump to abuse the company’s terms of service in his erratic messaging to the world. The protestors projected images reading “@jack is #complicit” and “Ban @realDonaldTrump” onto the facade of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Tuesday evening after the President sent his latest and most bellicose tweet ever.

Psychologists will have a field day with Trump’s “mine is bigger than yours” adolescent taunt, but for the vast majority of the world, the tweet sparked paranoia over the incipient nuclear holocaust on the horizon.

On a Facebook page for the protest, entitled Trump goes or @jack goes, protestors made this statement of purpose:

“Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, has enabled @realDonaldTrump from his first dog whistles in the birther movement to his latest nuclear pissing contest. Twitter is endangering the world and breaking its own terms of service to do it. Trump or Jack must go.”

A spokesperson for Twitter told The Hill that they consider Trump’s tweet not to be a violation of their terms of service since it is not a “specific threat.” Apparently, general annihilation is too fuzzy a concept to be considered a specific threat by Twitter. Twitter’s terms of service prohibit making “specific threats of violence or wish[ing] for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people.”  North Koreans, Iranians, Pakistanis, and Muslims in general excepted, apparently.

Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has in the past has countered objections to Trump’s tweets by claiming that the messages are newsworthy and valuable instruments of political transparency.

The only thing transparent here is that handing Trump a phone and Twitter is like handing a violent lunatic a machine gun and a cartload of ammunition. You can’t expect anything good to come out of either situation.

Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.