Protesters gather on the second day of pro-Trump events fueled by President Donald Trump’s continuing allegations of electoral fraud to overturn the results before Congress finalizes them at a joint session of the 117th Congress on Wednesday, January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Kent Nishimura | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
It was the last straw.
Following the takeover of the United States Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd, Twitter and Facebook withdrew President Donald Trump’s accounts, suspending him from posting based on the fear that his messages would incite even more violence than we have seen before. Congress halls.
But Wednesday was not the first time that Trump violated social media policies that would cause a normal person to be banned. Wednesday’s events were an inevitable conclusion thanks to the conspiracy-laden conversation in the darkest corners of the internet that social media companies have allowed to spread freely.
During Trump’s presidency, Facebook and Twitter rewrote their policies to give the president more freedom to say dangerous things, under the pretext that it was important for the public to know the flow of thoughts from world leaders. These policies were clearly designed around Trump’s online behavior and gave him the freedom to spread messages of hatred, conspiracy and violence.
At best, these policies simply enabled Trump’s lies and calls for violence. At worst, they let these dangerous messages go viral and were believed by enough people who were willing to break down the Capitol doors.
For years, tech industry observers speculated what the last straw would be: what would Trump have to say or do to make technology platforms limit his messages on social media?
Now we know.
These were not threats of nuclear war. There were no veiled threats that demonstrators for racial equality would be shot last summer. It was none of the countless lies about the results of our last election. It was only after the president’s words resulted directly in an attack on the Capitol building by his furious supporters that the technology platforms took a real step and blocked Trump from posting, at least temporarily. Twitter went so far as to say that Trump would be banned permanently if he violated the company’s security policies again after his suspension. On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Trump’s suspension, which was originally set for 24 hours, will extend at least until the presidential transition on January 20.
It is worth a brief history lesson on how we got here. Only in 2020, more than three years after Trump’s presidency, Facebook and Twitter began to label their messages with fact-checking links and security warnings. And this was mainly spurred by Trump’s messages about George Floyd’s protests and false claims about the legitimacy of the ballots in the mail in the months before the November election. Trump was not verified on social media for the vast majority of his presidency and was given the freedom to oxygenate the worst impulses from his followers as a result.
Now there will be a reckoning.
In the coming weeks, we will have to look at the role of social media in allowing the darkness that we witnessed on Wednesday. The Facebook and Twitter approach that a world leader must have a free rein to say what he wants without consequences has ignored the fact that a president’s words have great power and influence over the people who see them. Over the years, Trump’s social media habit has fueled anger and resentment among his followers, finally growing in the violence we saw on Capitol Hill.
For those watching closely, however, this is not surprising. The same conspiracies and lies that fed the crowd on Wednesday started in the dark corners of the internet, found their way to the main social platforms and were repeated by the main conservative vehicles. The conspiracies were channeled to a president who was already inclined to believe them and spread them over his social accounts, creating a cycle of false and dangerous information that fed itself.
These lies continued even after the turmoil. Almost as soon as the crowd stormed the Capitol, conspiracy theorists online postulated that the people who stormed the building were not Trump supporters, but liberal activists posing as Trump supporters. In a matter of hours, the message reached Twitter from the House of Representatives plenary, when Representative Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Made the same false statement in his comments, objecting to the election of President-elect Joe Biden. He supported his claims by citing reports from a fake facial recognition company that claimed to have identified antifa members in the mafia.
This is how the online conspiracy ecosystem operates quickly. The crowd had barely entered the Capitol when the next lie started to settle online. Within hours, we had at least one elected representative believing and repeating this. And you can bet that the narrative “actually was the antifa that invaded the Capitol” will dominate the conservative media at the end of Thursday. And the president himself will certainly be ready to share those conspiracies on social media when he is allowed to post again.
It is the same pattern that we saw repeatedly during Trump’s presidency. If someone, especially those in orbit close to Trump, is saying that he is surprised by what happened on Wednesday, then he either wasn’t paying attention or dismissed it as serious online chat.
But we learned on Wednesday that online threats were serious and online conspiracy theories were activated by the president. And they were empowered by the Wild West attitude of social media companies to allow false information to reach millions on their platforms and fuel violence.