It seemed as if there were no more ways for the nightmare to grow more dire, and yet it always did. Britain left the European Union, Brazil and the Philippines came to be ruled by thugs who routinely threatened to kill their political opponents, and India, once a beacon of religious pluralism, descended into Islamophobic mob violence. Just a few years into this unprecedented global experiment, several formerly stable liberal democracies found themselves on the precipice of authoritarianism. Social media was hardly the only malign force in the world, but it certainly didn’t seem to be helping.
#Twitter trump ban then enthuses about professional
Instead, with shocking speed, social media decimated professional media, abraded our civic life, coaxed us into unhealthy relationships with our phones and with one another, harvested and monetized our personal data, warped our brains and our politics, and made us brittle and twitchy and frail, all while a few entrepreneurs and investors continued to profit from our addiction and confusion. They seemed to assume, blithely and conveniently, that the marketplace of ideas would take care of itself. Twitter and the other major social networks spent their first decade of existence branding themselves as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” using this as a catchall excuse to absolve themselves of any real responsibility for moderating their platforms. We should worry about this, but we should also worry about another slippery slope: the one we are already on. The suppression of speech we despise can lead down a slippery slope toward the suppression of speech we cherish indeed, it almost always does. But, given that Dorsey and a handful of other techno-oligarchs have this ability, they might as well be pressured (or shamed, or regulated) into using it wisely. Is it worrisome that Jack Dorsey, a weirdly laconic billionaire with a castaway beard who has never been elected to any public office, is able to make unilateral, unaccountable decisions that may help determine whether our country survives or self-immolates? Yes, it is. Does censoring a head of state set a dangerous precedent? Yes, it does, but so does allowing a head of state to use a platform’s enormous power, over the course of several years, to dehumanize women, inflame racist paranoia, flirt with nuclear war, and incite armed sedition, often in flagrant violation of the company’s rules. Nothing in the Constitution prohibits a private company from enforcing its own policies if anything, the First Amendment protects a company’s right to do so.
Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, neatly summarized the tension (in a tweet, naturally): “It’s coherent-and in my view absolutely appropriate-to believe both that (i) the social media companies were right to suspend Trump’s accounts last week and (ii) the companies’ immense power over public discourse is a problem for democracy.” In another tweet, he added, “The First Amendment question is easy. There was a good amount of gloating-the only thing easier than kicking a man when he’s down is dunking on an account after it’s locked-but the Schadenfreude was tempered with caution. Well, this is the digital ghetto.”) Among Trump’s opponents, reactions were more mixed. (Glenn Beck, during a segment on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, compared the Trump ban and other Big Tech crackdowns to “the Germans with the Jews behind the wall. On the Trump-apologist right, the suspension was denounced as Orwellian tyranny, deep-state collusion, or worse. Many of the takes seemed canned, the way an obituary of a terminally ill celebrity is often pre-written. After Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s account, earlier this month, the reactions were quick, ubiquitous, and mostly predictable.
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