Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, unveiled a decision to stop promoting tweets from Donald Trump. The decision is likely colored by both current events related to racial inequality and Trump's clashes with other social media platforms.
Following Twitter's decision, two weeks ago, to label an incorrect Trump tweet about voter fraud with a link to the correct information, Trump's outreach on social media has been a topic of conversation for every platform. Mark Zuckerberg was clear, at that time, that Facebook is uninterested in editorializing its content by highlighting lies and misinformation. Twitter has doubled-down on its decision, later removing a few posts from Trump entirely, on the grounds that they incited violence which is a violation of the site's policies.
Twitter's reasoning was echoed by Snap in a statement released this week that explained why the company will no longer promote messages from Trump on Snapchat. CNN Business reports that Snap spokeswoman Rachel Racusen clarified, after the company released a message about its overall role as a platform during a racial crisis, that Snapchat is "not currently promoting the President's content on Snapchat's Discover platform." The decision comes after Trump's tweets from Saturday in which he spoke on using "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons" to intimidate people protesting the lack of justice for the murder of unarmed black people; a message that could reasonably be considered as threatening or inciting violence.
Snapchat's Decision Differs from Twitter's
This is a significant move even as other platforms slowly start to lower the double standard of allowing Trump to say things for which the average user would be banned because Snapchat's Discover feed is not driven by algorithms. Twitter and Facebook have less direct control over what people see because their news feeds are populated by using math and crunching user engagement data. Snapchat's Discover is curated by people, so anything users see there surfaced as a result of a conscious decision by the Snapchat team. That makes this much more of an editorialization than what Twitter has done because Discover is editorialized by its very nature. While Twitter can fall back on its reasoning that it has a policy to enforce and that policy isn't entirely built around Donald Trump, Snapchat's decision is a blatant choice to stop highlighting posts from him.
At the same time, Snapchat and Twitter are also fulfilling different needs. It could be argued that Snapchat means far less to Trump since he doesn't personally use it. If Twitter blocked Trump's page entirely, that would practically render his social media presence void. If Snapchat blocked him (which is not what it's doing), that wouldn't affect his tweet addiction. However, Snapchat does have a large impact on voting since it's aimed at younger people who only recently gained the right to vote. Politicians like Joe Biden use Snapchat Discover to connect to young people, and with the Trump campaign now missing out on that avenue, Trump's words may have cost him a vital means of connecting to voters.
Source: CNN