After Facebook de-platformed US President Donald Trump, Twitter permanently suspended his account yesterday. In a statement, the company warned indeed that two tweets sent by Trump on Friday morning were "highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021".
Trump's two final tweets stated: "The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!" and "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
Though at first glance they seem less worrying than others, Twitter explained that there were indicators the messages were being received and understood as encouragement to Trump supporters to organise further armed protest and even a second attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021. The tweets seemed indeed to endorse the domestic terrorists who stormed on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, calling them "patriots", implying the election was not legitimate and indicating that, since he won't be attending the inauguration, people will be able to violently target it.
Trump started then using his official presidential account @POTUS and his campaign account @TeamTrump, to complain about the ban, but the tweets were quickly taken down. As a result the campaign account @TeamTrump was permanently banned from Twitter; government accounts @POTUS or @WhiteHouse are not suspended at the time of writing this post, but use is limited. The accounts of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump attorney Sidney Powell, the 8Chan administrator Ron Watkins, and attorney Lin Wood were instead also suspended as they repeatedly posted about QAnon election conspiracies.
Besides, Google removed the rightwing social network Parler, endorsed by Donald Trump supporters, from its app store.
These suspensions remind us that social media must be regulated, but also that digital content is temporary and, while we are glad Trump can't tweet anymore his rambling, racist, aggressive messages, a record should be kept of what he did so far as a proof of how social media can be abused even by those in power.
There is actually a place that kept track of Trump's tweets in a very unique way - the Tiny Pricks Project by Canada-based American artist and activist Diana Weymar.
Trump's tweets have been the subject of articles, features and posts, but the Tiny Pricks Project went even further, finding a very original way to keep records.
Everything started exactly three years ago: on January 8th, 2018 Weymar saw Donald Trump's tweet about being a "very stable genius" and felt she had to do something.
The tweet made her angry, but also seemed incredibly surreal and stupid as well. So she stitched the words "I am a very stable genius" into a piece of her grandmother's abandoned floral needlework from the 1960s. She posted it on Instagram and got an overwhelming response.
Surprised, Weymar still hoped the Twitter account would have become more professional as the weeks passed, and she thought that maybe she may have stitched one quote a week when Trump said something that made her angry or that sounded unbelievable.
Yet soon, from an occasional task, stitching Trump's tweets turned into a fully-fledged art project as the messages became more and more outrageous, hurtful, surreal and ridiculous and Weymar found herself stitching five or six pieces a week. Eventually she began creating several pieces a day and launched a bigger project asking stitchers from all over the world to participate to the project by donating materials or pick a Trump quote and embroider it.
Three years of madness, propaganda and baseless conspiracy theories later, the project turned into an international textile protest against Trump featuring almost 4,000 Tiny Pricks and over a thousand participants globally.
Check the Instagram page of the project and you will spot Trump's favourite slogans including "Fake News!", his gibberish mispelt messages ("Covfefe") and rambling outlandish suggestions about Covid-19 being just a flu. Some stitchers even dug deeper and added Trump's quotes from the '80s.
Different people responded in different ways to the same quotes, interpreting the tweets in ironic and sarcastic ways, others poured their anger and frustration into each stitch.
Weymar called indeed the project "Tiny Pricks" connecting the act of stitching and piercing the fabric to Trump's quotes that prick at people's conscience.
The embroidered pieces weren't meant to make these words eternal, but they were created to make us all ponder about words.
The Latin motto says "verba volant, scripta manent" (spoken words fly away, written words remain), and quite often what you write on digital media can get easily lost, be removed or erased. Tiny Pricks wanted instead to give a material dimension to these words to make sure people could stare at them and confront the stupidity, the aggressiveness and the horror.
Besides, there is also an intriguing juxtaposition here: Trump's messages have often been angry, violent and racist, but they are translated by the people who took part in the project using soft textiles and threads, a delicate craft and a civilised medium, something that creates a juxtaposition and tries to bring back the political conversation into a calmer dimension, highlighting the importance of the role of civility in society.
According to Weymar, the project will stop accepting submissions once Trump is out of office, as she feels the word "end" must be written - or rather embroidered - on this long and painful chapter in American history.
Yet the public art project was already exhibited at the Lingua Franca store, owned by Rachelle Hruska, in New York City, so there is hope that in future the embroidered pieces, maybe combined in an installation, will travel around and be on display maybe in a museum.
After all this embroidered archive of a digital database is the perfect project to create awareness and prompt us all to remember, it collects evidence of nightmarish dark times that will prompt us (and those who will come after us) to wonder "Was he really able in those years to say that on social media?"
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