Trump’s Twitter Account Permanently Suspended

“It is now time for Congress to repeal Section 230 and put Big Tech on the same legal footing as every other company in America,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on Friday.

Mr. Trump had repeatedly told allies who raised the possibility that social media firms would bar him, “They’ll never ban me.”

In the White House, there was an extensive process for drafting official tweets. But at night and early in the morning, Mr. Trump composed his own tweets on his iPhone, often to the chagrin of advisers and Republican lawmakers who then spent hours or days dealing with the fallout.

“Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here,” Mr. Trump told The Financial Times in April 2017.

In a meeting at the White House last year, Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, suggested that the president move over to Parler, an alternative social media site that has become popular with right-wing users. But Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, shot down the idea later, sharing Mr. Trump’s confidence that Twitter wouldn’t act, and it never happened, according to a person briefed on what took place.

While the White House still has official Twitter accounts like @POTUS and @WhiteHouse until the inauguration, Twitter has said it will facilitate the transfer of those accounts to the incoming Biden administration. Before the mob attack on Wednesday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, was involved in discussions about transferring those accounts, a person familiar with the discussions said.

The pushback against Mr. Trump online began on Wednesday after his loyalists, urged on by the president, breached the Capitol building. In the aftermath, Twitter temporarily locked Mr. Trump’s account, followed by Facebook. At the time, Twitter said the risks of keeping his commentary live on its site had become too high.