Hours after President Donald Trump’s permanent ban, Twitter seemingly allowed public calls to hang Vice President Mike Pence to trend.
“WTF why is this allowed to trend?” questioned journalist Yashar Ali.
“I get that people have been tweeting it to quote some of the insurrectionists but it shouldn’t be allowed to trend.”
Ali shared a screenshot showing that the sentiment was tweeted more than 14,000 times at the time he flagged it.
The line started during Wednesday’s unrest, with rioters chanting for the Vice President’s execution while storming the US Capitol.
Other rioters even erected a makeshift noose outside the federal building, and tied nooses out of other objects, like wires from destroyed news equipment that rioters were able to get their hands on.
The move comes after Pence signaled his intention to allow the certification of the electoral votes to proceed, officially putting Biden on the road to becoming the 46th president of the United States.
Photo Editor Jim Bourg shared on Twitter that he’d “heard at least 3 different rioters at the Capitol say that they hoped to find Vice President Mike Pence and execute him by hanging him from a Capitol Hill tree as a traitor.”
Twitter spokesperson said in a statement that the social media giant has rules about trending subjects.
“We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending.
We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter. This means that at times, we may prevent certain content from trending. As per our Help Center, there are Rules for trends — if we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action,” the spokesperson wrote.
Twitter’s Help Center had laid out rules that include preventing trends that break Twitter’s rules, such as profanity or adult/graphic content, as well as those that “targets the privacy of victims of serious crimes and of minors, who are private figures.”