Elon Musk could soon have a Trump-sized headache - POLITICO

But Musk also held out the possibility of temporarily suspending people who post content that’s illegal, directly incites violence or is otherwise “destructive to the world.”Trump’s critics say his past tweets crossed that line repeatedly — and if Twitter lets him return, his flagrant disregard of the social network’s rules will become Musk’s headache.“Musk is discovering all the questions that thousands of people at lots of different platforms have been wrestling with for decades,” said Joshua Tucker, a co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics. (He has a reported 2.7 million followers on his newly created social network, Truth Social.) But he could easily change his mind.So it’s a good occasion to revisit some of Trump’s most notorious, rule-breaking or controversial tweets — a possible taste of what could lie in the network’s future:Some Trump critics were urging Twitter to kick him off even before he was sworn in, citing his use of the platform to denigrate people who opposed him and make baseless claims of fraud in the 2016 election.Calls for the company to discipline Trump only increased once he became president — even as Twitter said his early posts didn’t violate its policies against harassment, racist or xenophobic rhetoric or threats of violence.One early flashpoint: the executive order Trump issued a week into his presidency banning travelers and refugees from several Muslim-majority countries. Twitter said it would continue to leave offending posts up in the name of newsworthiness, but in some cases would append warning labels or limit the tweet’s spread.Twitter’s crackdown began in the spring of 2020, as Trump lashed back at the racial-justice protests that sprang up following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.In a tweet on May 29, Trump called protesters in Minneapolis “THUGS” and appeared to threaten violence against the protesters, saying that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump had spent years making false statements about the 2016 presidential election that put him in the White House — for example, tweeting that he had “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” (No evidence supports that claim.)Twitter stepped in when Trump began warning that massive fraud would mar the 2020 presidential contest.In May 2020, the company added fact-checking warnings to his tweets for the first time, flagging two posts in which he baselessly claimed that mail-in ballots were likely to be “substantially fraudulent.” Trump responded by issuing an executive order calling on federal regulators to roll back legal protections for social media platforms that restrict their users’ speech.Twitter further expanded its election misinformation and civic integrity policies in September 2020, saying it would label or remove “false or misleading information that could undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process.”Trump continued to be a repeat offender.Twitter slapped fact-check labels on Trump tweets the day after the November 2020 election, saying he had violated its policies by falsely alleging that “surprise ballot dumps” had altered the results. But later on Jan. 8, Twitter said they were the reasons that it ultimately booted Trump — permanently suspending his personal account, @RealDonaldTrump.“These two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence,” the company said in a blog post explaining its permanent suspension of Trump’s account.