President Donald Trump has threatened North Korea and others through Twitter — which may seem like a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.
But the company likely won’t be blocking Trump as they did with Actress Rose McGowan or Trump ally Roger Stone any time soon.
That’s because Twitter deems Trump’s tweets “newsworthy,” according to CEO Jack Dorsey at the New York Times DealBook conference Thursday.
“If an account were to publicly attack or harass a private citizen, we would take action,” Dorsey said. “We do have a clause in our terms of service that we unfortunately did not have publicly stated…around newsworthiness and public interest.”
If an item is newsworthy or in the public interest, the company keeps the content up because it becomes a record, he said.
Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017
Still, Dorsey admitted that the process of deciding what is newsworthy and what is not has been a work in progress.
“This is a subjective evaluation by us,” he said. “And we work very hard to make sure we are listening to voices, specifically the journalists on our platform to determine newsworthiness…. In some cases we’re going to get it wrong.”
Dorsey added that Twitter is working to communicate the company’s terms of service, and how it interprets those rules.
Twitter has previously come under fire for how it decides to suspend certain accounts.
Actor Rose McGowan was suspended from the social network after she tweeted expletives at Ben Affleck, accusing him of lying about what he knew of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual misconduct. Many women then took to the platform to criticize the decision.
There may be one other reason Twitter won’t suspend Trump: according to one analyst, his presence on the network is worth about $2 billion in market value to the company.