Twitter says it will update public policies to include the newsworthiness of tweets that potentially violate rules after Trump threatens North Korea
Twitter didn't act to remove President Donald Trump's tweet threatening North Korea in part because it is newsworthy, the company said today.
Context & Ripple Effects
In September 2017, after President Donald Trump tweeted a threat toward North Korea, Twitter declined to remove the tweet and said it would rewrite its public policies to formally account for a tweet's newsworthiness — an early acknowledgment that world-leader accounts would be judged by a different standard than everyone else's.
That discretion held for years before hardening into visible enforcement: by mid-2020 the company was adding click-through violation notices to Trump's tweets about Minneapolis protesters (glorifying-violence labels), and by January 2021 it had suspended the account outright under that same policy. The 2017 newsworthiness carve-out is the origin point of that whole arc.
First-order effects
- Trump's threatening tweets stay on the platform: newsworthiness becomes a documented reason not to enforce rules against the president's account, even when the same content would violate them for other users.
Second-order effects
- Affected private parties gain leverage by forcing the issue publicly — as Joe Scarborough's aide's widow did in 2020, extracting a promised policy update without removal — pushing Twitter to replace quiet exceptions with stated rules.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, moderation of political leaders moves from ad-hoc executive judgment to a codified ladder — exempt, labeled, restricted, suspended — with each rung justified in public policy documents rather than left implicit.
The trend: Platform governance of head-of-state speech is shifting from silent discretionary exemptions toward explicit, tiered enforcement policies that apply differently to verified world leaders.