Snapchat will no longer promote content from Trump’s account

Snap said Wednesday that it will no longer promote President Donald Trump’s Snapchat account in a page of curated content called Discover because it doesn’t want to “amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice.”

“We are not currently promoting the President’s content on Snapchat’s Discover platform. We will not amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover. Racial violence and injustice have no place in our society and we stand together with all who seek peace, love, equality, and justice in America,” a spokesman for Snap said in a statement.

The rare move from the ephemeral messaging app shows that social media companies are being more wary about the type of political content they promote on their platforms ahead of the US presidential election. Conservatives have accused social media platforms of suppressing their speech, but the company’s have denied doing so. 

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, took action after Twitter placed a “public interest” notice over Trump’s tweet for glorifying violence. Twitter users could still view the tweet after they clicked on the notice. In the tweet posted on Friday, Trump stated “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He made the remarks in response to news about protests that have erupted following the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minnesota who died after a white police officer pinned his neck down with his knee. The incident was recorded on video and Floyd says in the footage that he couldn’t breathe.

Trump also made the same remarks in a post on Facebook, but the social network determined that it didn’t violate its rules against inciting violence. Trump references the National Guard in his social media posts so Facebook viewed his remarks as a warning about state action, which is allowed on the platform. Facebook employees have protested that decision and staged a virtual walkout this week. 

Trump has denied trying to incite racial violence. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Snap said that Trump’s Snapchat account will still be public but that no account has the right to be promoted on Discover. The decision was made over the weekend. On Monday, Snap published a memo Snap CEO Evan Spiegel sent to his employees in which he denounces racism.

“We simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform. Our Discover content platform is a curated platform, where we decide what we promote. We have spoken time and again about working hard to make a positive impact, and we will walk the talk with the content we promote on Snapchat,” he said in the memo.

That doesn’t mean that Snap will remove accounts that it disagrees with or are “insensitive to some people,” he said. 

Last week, Trump signed an executive order that aims to limit the legal protections that social media companies get for content posted by its users. The executive order faced its first legal challenge yesterday when the Center for Democracy & Technology filed a lawsuit alleging it violated the First Amendment and was retaliatory.