Why it took so lengthy: Twitter has been reluctant to implement its personal guidelines towards Trump’s tweets in the previous. Though Trump has tweeted and retweeted many seemingly rule-breaking posts, a few loopholes protected him, together with exceptions for tweets from authorities entities and concerns for the “newsworthiness” of an in any other case rule-breaking tweet. Final yr, Twitter introduced that in uncommon instances it will restrict the attain of tweets from giant accounts held by authorities officers that had been in violation of its guidelines. The covid-19 “infodemic” has compelled most social-media platforms to vary how they implement their guidelines as doubtlessly harmful misinformation about the pandemic spreads.

What about Trump’s different misleading tweets? Over the previous a number of days, the president has tweeted a number of different issues that appeared to violate Twitter’s insurance policies. Final Wednesday, Trump falsely tweeted that Nevada was sending out “unlawful” vote-by-mail ballots, and promised to “maintain up” funding to Nevada and Michigan in the event that they pursued mail ballots for the presidential elections. These tweets, in response to Twitter at the time, didn’t violate their insurance policies towards election misinformation as a result of they didn’t straight attempt to dissuade individuals from voting. The platform’s election integrity insurance policies prohibit utilizing Twitter for “the function of manipulating or interfering in elections or different civic processes.”

Twitter additionally declined to take motion towards a few of Trump’s tweets selling a false conspiracy idea suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was, whereas serving in Congress in 2001, accountable for the demise of an intern. In reality, investigators discovered no proof of foul play, and there’s no thriller surrounding the reason for demise. The widower of the staffer wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey final week asking him to take away the tweets. After the letter was printed in the New York Instances on Tuesday, Twitter launched a assertion saying that it was “deeply sorry about the ache” the statements triggered and was “working to broaden present product options and insurance policies so we will extra successfully handle issues like this going ahead, and … hope to have these modifications in place shortly.”