Twitter will not host archived tweets by former President Donald Trump. Following the social network’s permanent ban of the businessman in January, content from the @realDonaldTrump account will not appear as archived posts.
According to tradition, institutional accounts like @WhiteHouse, @POTUS, @VP, and @PressSec are preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) before the online handles transfer to the incoming regime. Trump, however, governed largely from his personal account, which NARA claims will be available to download from the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library site “as soon as possible.” It won’t, however, go live on Twitter, where users can still read, retweet, like, and interact with other former officials’ posts.
“I can confirm that our teams have been working with NARA on the preservation of tweets from @realDonaldTrump, as is standard with any administration transition and as we’ve done previously,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement emailed to PCMag. That partnership, however, does not extend beyond simply following the law.
“Given that we permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump, the content from the account will not appear on Twitter as it did previously or as archived administration accounts do currently, regardless of how NARA decides to display the data it has preserved,” the company continued. “Administration accounts that are archived on the service are accounts that were not in violation of the Twitter rules.”
The National Archives did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment. But a spokesperson told Politico it “is still exploring the best way” to make Trump’s content public.
“Twitter is solely responsible for the decision of what content is available on their platform,” the agency said. “Ultimately the platform owners can decline to host these accounts. NARA preserves platform-independent copies of social media records and is working to make that content available to the public.”
Any and all @realDonaldTrump tweets transferred to the department will be included—blocked and deleted posts, too. There is currently no official record of the 26,000-plus tweets made by the former Commander in Chief while in office, according to Politico.
