Trump's offensive tweets could be labelled by Twitter for breaking rules

'How can we put some context around it so people are aware that that content is actually a violation of our rules and it is serving a particular purpose in remaining on the platform?'

A mock up of US President Donald Trump using Twitter (Getty Images)

Twitter is considering labelling Donald Trump's tweets that violate its rules, an executive for the social media firm has revealed.

Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, policy, trust and safety at Twitter, said that tweets by public figures that break the firm's guidelines could be annotated to explain why they are not deleted.

The company has faced criticism for allowing hateful and offensive content on its platform, particularly in tweets by the US President.

Twitter has consistently argued that such tweets should not be removed because they are newsworthy.

"One of the things we're working really closely on with our product and engineering folks is, 'How can we label that?'," Ms Gadde said at an event on Wednesday.

"How can we put some context around it so people are aware that that content is actually a violation of our rules and it is serving a particular purpose in remaining on the platform?"

She continued: "When we leave that content on the platform there's no context around that and it just lives on Twitter and people can see it and they just assume that is the type of content or behaviour that's allowed by our rules."

Ms Gadde didn't rule out the possibility of tweets from Trump or other public figures being deleted, saying, "an example would be a direct violent threat against an individual that we wouldn't leave on the platform because of the danger it poses to that individual."

There have been several high-profile calls for Trump's Twitter account to be deactivated, including from US Congressman Keith Ellison who called the president a "social media bully" in 2017.

When Trump threatened to launch an attack on North Korea that same year, numerous more calls were made for his account to be deactivated and the tweet deleted.

Earlier this year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey refused to say whether Trump would be banned if he publicly called for his followers to murder journalists.

"That would be a violent threat. We'd definitely... You know we're in constant communication with all governments around the world. So we'd certainly talk about it," he said.

"I'm not going to talk about particulars. We've established protocol, it's transparent. It's out there for everyone to read. We have, independent of the US president, we have conversations with all governments. It's not just limited to this one."