Snapchat is the latest social media platform to address controversial posts made by President Donald Trump. A spokesperson for Snap Inc., the company that owns Snapchat, issued a release on Monday, stating that they wouldn’t be promoting any posts made by the president.
“We are not currently promoting the President’s content on Snapchat’s Discover platform,” the statement read, according to the New York Times. “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.” The decision comes after Snap, Inc. CEO Evan Spiegal issued a memo on Monday.
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Spiegal’s memo stated that Trump’s posts would remain on the platform and be accessible to others. However, they wouldn’t appear on the Discover tab, which promotes content from across its platform of short-form ephemeral photos and video clips. “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,” it read, in part. “Our Discover content platform is a curated platform, where we decide what we promote.”
The company also explained that the decision was reached on Saturday after Trump tweeted that demonstrators protesting police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death would be “greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons.” The post didn’t appear on Snapchat, although Twitter took no action regarding its content.
Snapchat’s decision also marks the latest controversial decision over how different platforms are handling the president’s rhetoric ahead of the elections in November. Twitter caused a firestorm after it had labeled two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots with a fact-check at the bottom, which disputed the claims he’d made. The decision was quickly labeled as censorship by several GOP lawmakers and pundits, as well as Trump himself, while others felt the decision didn’t go far enough. Facebook, meanwhile, has elected to do nothing regarding the president’s posts, despite widespread outcry from some of its top employees.
Snapchat is currently seeing similar blowback that Twitter faced. Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale accused the platform of “trying to rig the 2020 election” while accusing Spiegel of being a “radical” in a statement on Wednesday. “Snapchat hates that so many of their users watch the President’s content and so they are actively engaging in voter suppression.”
