Donald Trump reportedly asked Twitter to remove a tweet from Chrissy Teigen calling him a “pussy ass bitch”.
In 2019, Teigen responded to a tweet from the former US president alluding to her as John Legend‘s “filthy mouthed wife”, and it’s now been revealed Trump’s team had tried to have the tweet taken down.
“Guys like boring musician @johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife, are talking now about how great it is—but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed,” Trump had tweeted, before he was banned.
Teigen replied: “Lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.”
At a congressional hearing yesterday (February 8) discussing Twitter’s decision to prevent users from reading a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Anika Collier Navaroli of Twitter’s content moderation team confirmed the Trump case to be accurate.
“The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?” representative Gerry Connolly is said to have asked Navaroli.
“I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” she said.
The Trump WH wanted Teigen’s tweet calling Trump a PAB taken down lol pic.twitter.com/WkyQoJ3zIP
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 8, 2023
The former US president was banned from the platforms, along with Twitter, after the US Capitol riots in January of 2021.
In a new blog post, Meta‘s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said that Trump will be allowed to return to the two platforms “in the coming weeks” with “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offences”.
In response, action groups including the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Free Press and Media Matters have shared concerns with the move, and said they’re unsure whether these new measures will be enough to prevent similar problems in the future.