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Donald Trump has sent his latest tweet. After eleven years and close to 60,000 posts, the president of the United States closed Twitter on Friday. At the same time, he was indefinitely blocked by Facebook and Instagram.
After the takeover of Congress and with only a few days for Joe Biden to assume the presidency, it seems reasonable to temporarily close the Twitter account. Trump has shown that he is not shy about trying to stimulate his 88 million followers even in delicate situations.
But the suspension of Donald Trump by Twitter is permanent. And the decision seems surprisingly unprincipled.
Twitter is a private company that basically has the right to extinguish which accounts it wants. Formally, the action is not a threat to freedom of expression.
But Twitter is also an important part of the social media oligopoly where much of political opinion now forms. In practice, politicians who are excluded from such platforms will have a difficult time reaching voters and winning elections.
Companies with such great global power should at least be able to demand clear rules and that crimes against them be punished equally, at least if they are committed by high-ranking politicians. That is far from the case today.
Three years ago, Donald Trump bragged on Twitter that he had a bigger and more powerful “Nuke Button” than Kim Jong-un, a covert threat from a nuclear attack on North Korea.
Greater political control over social media runs the risk of crazy fronts like Trump gaining more power over them.
So Twitter did not act. But this friday the company pointed to the two tweets which caused the account to be closed permanently. In one, Trump wrote that the 75 million Americans who voted for him should not be treated disrespectfully or unfairly. In the second, Trump announced that he will not be present when Biden is sworn in as president.
Those messages were broken the politics of glorifying violence, according to the very implausible reasoning of Twitter. Rather, it appears that the company was looking for reasons to bow to the prevailing political winds, and that post-election, Trump’s threat to legislate against internet giants is no longer feared.
Trump’s suspension shows the danger that much of the global debate is now being controlled from the west coast of the United States.
At home, American politicians who bite their nails are very shortsighted: the other day former Congressman Ron Paul was suspended from Facebook, according to own information after criticizing the Internet giants’ treatment of Trump.
But Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme spiritual leader, has not yet had his Twitter account closed, despite posts that the state of Israel should be removed.
At the same time, the terrible abuses on Facebook, which make the assault on Congress appear peaceful, have gone unnoticed. In countries such as the Philippines, Libya and India, the platform has been used to organize hate campaigns and lynchings. In Burma, Facebook accounts were the driving force behind the rising wave of violence against the Rohingya during the alleged 2017 genocide.
That problem doesn’t go away just because the internet giants are now kicking out Donald Trump. The algorithms that provoke polarizing posts and outright lies are not rewarded on platforms either.
There is no obvious solution. Greater political control over social media runs the risk of crazy fronts like Trump gaining more power over them.
But debaters now unreservedly rejoicing over the president’s suspension should consider which politicians the unprincipled internet giants might throw out if the political winds change.
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