- President Donald Trump has 1.5 million followers on Snapchat.
Snap, the company behind the Gen Z-popular social networking app Snapchat, said on Wednesday that it has stopped showing President Donald Trump’s account on the app’s home page after determining that the President’s public comments are often too dangerous to be promoted to the app’s 229 million users.
The President can still use his Snapchat account; it will just be a lot less visible on the platform. Until now, his account has been regularly featured on Snapchat’s “Discover” page, along with the accounts of other public figures, including New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Kim Kardashian.
“We will make it clear with our actions that there is no gray area when it comes to racism, violence and injustice,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in a company memo published on Monday. “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.”
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The memo was first sent to Snap employees over the weekend, per The Information, after President Trump posted an inflammatory statement on Facebook, in which he called George Floyd demonstrators “thugs” and threatened to deploy military to clamp down protests if things get violent.
In the memo, Spiegel expressed his support for protestors in the Black Lives Matter movement. Like many other tech CEOs, he pledged donations to equal rights organizations and called for changes at a higher level. “Private philanthropy can patch holes, or accelerate progress, but it alone cannot cross the deep and wide chasm of injustice,” he wrote. “We must cross that chasm together as a united nation. United in the striving for freedom, equality, and justice for all.”
Snap’s reaction to the George Floyd movement so far falls somewhere between that of its two largest social media rivals, Twitter and Facebook. Although the platform will no longer promote violent content like that posted by President Trump, Spiegel has said Snapchat would not remove or label such content just because some people disagree with it.
In contrast, Twitter recently began labeling some of President Trump’s tweets as potential misinformation for the first time after a pair of the President’s election-related tweets drew public ire, while Facebook chose to do nothing with similar posts, per the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that politicians’ speech shouldn’t be subject to the Facebook’s moderation.