Biz Stone Explained Twitter’s Decision on Donald Trump’s North Korea Tweet

Should Twitter have deleted this?

@realDonaldTrump

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone explained the social network’s decision not to remove a controversial tweet by President Donald Trump.

Trump’s tweet Saturday was perceived by many as a threat against North Korea, and Twitter received a great deal of backlash for not deleting it.

Stone cited “newsworthiness” and “public interest” as reasons for allowing the tweet to remain live, writing in a blog post: “We hold all accounts to the same rules and consider a number of factors when assessing whether tweets violate our rules. Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a tweet is of public interest. This has long been internal policy, and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will.”

David Cohen

David Cohen is editor of Adweek's Social Pro Daily.