The man behind a Twitter account devoted to tweeting the exact same words as President Donald Trump said he was relieved to learn that the\u00a0president had been banned from Twitter, effective Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
@SuspendThePres was created by Andrew Lazar\u00a0in May as\u00a0an experiment to see if Twitter\u2019s algorithms would flag Trump\u2019s tweets as inappropriate if they came from the account of a regular citizen, rather than from the account of the U.S. president.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lazar, who since joined the Arizona Lincoln Project leadership team as a volunteer, encouraged @SuspendThePres\u2019 over 54,000 followers to report rule-violating tweets. Over the course of the last eight months, Lazar previously told HuffPost,\u00a0the account was flagged four times for posting what Twitter described as tweets \u201cglorifying violence\u201d and \u201cposting misleading information about voting.\u201d In each instance, the offending tweets were deleted by the platform and the account was temporarily locked.<\/p>\n
However, when they came from Trump\u2019s account, those same tweets were allowed to stay online, some with disclaimers attached, due to Twitter policies\u00a0that generally leave rule-violating content from world leaders up, since such statements are deemed within the public interest.<\/p>\n
All of this changed after pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, and Twitter finally permanently banned the president from the platform,\u00a0citing the risk of further incitement of violence\u00a0(after initially just levying a 12-hour ban on his account).<\/p>\n
Lazar tweeted from the @SuspendThePres account that the development was a moment to celebrate, and thanked supporters for playing a role in exposing the dangers of Trump\u2019s rhetoric.<\/p>\n
The same message was posted to @SuspendThePres\u2019 Facebook page, which has a smaller following. Trump was also \u201cindefinitely\u201d suspended from\u00a0Facebook this week.<\/p>\n
On his personal Twitter account, Lazar wrote that waking up in the morning without having to check and retweet the president\u2019s feed \u2014 a process that took hours \u2014 was \u201cliberating.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter\u2019s original stance on a double standard was proving to have real world disastrous consequences and they put a stop to it,\u201d Lazar told HuffPost, stressing that a normal account would never have gotten away with Trump\u2019s brazen speech, adding that Twitter\u2019s decision was \u201cbetter late than never.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lazar also addressed those \u2014 like Donald Trump Jr. \u2014 who called the president\u2019s suspension a form of censorship.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone decrying Trump\u2019s eventual suspension as an overt act of censorship needs only to look at the results of the [@SuspendThePres] experiment,\u201d Lazar said. \u201cHe was given hundreds of slaps on the wrist and chances to change his content to conform to the rules he signed when opening an account. … It\u2019s not censorship to enforce your platform\u2019s rules. If anything, it\u2019s leveling the playing field.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the future of the @SuspendThePres account, Lazar said that he planned to continue posting updates related to Trump\u2019s remaining days in office, and might repurpose the account to focus on another political figure in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile there certainly are a number of people whom it could be pointed to, none, so far as I\u2019m concerned, deserve the same level of scrutiny as the previous subject,\u201d Lazar said. \u201cTime may change that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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