Facing renewed calls for president’s removal from service after his latest tweets on North Korea, company says move would ‘hamper discussion’

Just days after Donald Trump’s Twitter taunting of Kim Jong-Un over nuclear war reignited calls for the company to ban the president from its platform, the social media company obliquely addressed the controversy in a statement defending its decision not to to censor “world leaders”.

“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the company wrote in a blogpost published Friday. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

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The statement does not name Trump or state any new policy, but instead offers a defense of the company’s current practice, which takes into account whether a tweet that might otherwise violate the company’s rules is “newsworthy” or in the “public interest”.

“We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” the company wrote. “We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind.”

Twitter’s defense of its treatment of world leaders comes at a time when its rival social media platform Facebook is facing criticism for a lack of transparency and coherence around its own treatment of political figures.

In December, Facebook deleted the social media accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic. The company told the New York Times that the deletions were due to the US government’s imposition of economic sanctions on Kadyrov, but other world leaders named on US sanctions lists, such as the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, have not been banned from Facebook.

Trump’s frequent and reckless use of Twitter defined him as a presidential candidate, but has elicited increased concern since his inauguration. From the White House, Trump has continued his use of the platform to attack political opponents (and allies) and journalists, and also to threaten North Korea and share anti-Muslim videos posted by a leader of a far-right British hate group.

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Many Trump critics have called for the president to be banned from the website – both because his tweets can often be construed as violating the platform’s rules and out of fear that his outbursts could actually spark a war. In August, the former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson launched an unsuccessful effort to crowdfund the purchase of Twitter in order to ban Trump.

In November, Trump’s personal account was briefly deactivated. The company attributed the outage to the actions of a contractor on his final day of work, and the contractor later claimed that he had made a mistake.

Some critics have suggested that Twitter’s reluctance to censor Trump’s Tweets stems from its understanding that Trump’s predilection for the platform provides outsize importance to a company that has failed to achieve the popularity of social media behemoths such as Facebook and YouTube.

But the company appeared to dismiss that criticism in the statement, writing: “No one person’s account drives Twitter’s growth, or influences these decisions.”