Mark Zuckerberg began considering the indefinite suspension of President Donald Trump’s Facebook account on the night of January 6, just hours after a crowd of Trump supporters invaded the United States Capitol.
Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, had for years taken a more direct approach to Trump’s false and incendiary claims, defending free speech and the journalistic value of his statements while a growing chorus of critics inside and outside the company demanded that he take action more aggressive.
But after a series of conversations with his top lieutenants – including COO Sheryl Sandberg; Monika Bickert, head of global content policy; the head of global affairs, Nick Clegg; and Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy and its main emissary to Republicans in Washington – Zuckerberg came to believe that Trump’s blatant incitement to violence to overturn the election has crossed the line, according to people familiar with conversations that did not ask to be named because the discussions were private.
Earlier in the day, Facebook banned Trump’s account for 24 hours. Now, Zuckerberg was preparing a much broader ban: one that would last at least until the end of Trump’s term.
The next morning, from his vacation home in Kauai, Hawaii, Zuckerberg made a call with Sandberg, Bickert, Clegg, Kaplan and other executives. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, was on hand, along with Neil Potts, the director of public policies for trust and security, and director of diversity Maxine Williams, among several others.
Zuckerberg said he decided that Trump’s attempts to incite violence and undermine the democratic process were grounds for an indefinite suspension. No one expressed a dissenting opinion, said people familiar with the call.
Shortly afterwards, Zuckerberg posted a post on Facebook explaining that “the risks of allowing the president to continue using our service during this period are simply too great.”
On the same day, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was considering a much more radical move, said sources familiar with Twitter’s deliberations. Based on the advice of Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s chief legal officer and his most trusted lieutenant, Dorsey came to believe that the appropriate course of action was to ban Trump’s personal account permanently, claiming that his ability to post posed a public security risk. .
Dorsey was in French Polynesia, having spent much of last year away from the San Francisco Bay Area, very concerned with other projects: Square, his mobile payment company; the future of cryptocurrency; and a possible acquisition of Jay-Z’s music streaming platform, Tidal. (Dorsey has spent a lot of time with Jay-Z in the past few months, both in Hawaii and in the Hamptons.)
After a series of talks with Gadde and other top Twitter executives, Dorsey passed a permanent ban, although he later expressed reservations about his power to influence “global public conversation” so strongly. Twitter announced the ban on Friday.
The Facebook and Twitter suspensions were a landmark moment for America’s social media giants and the most visible demonstration of their absolute power. With a few unilateral decisions, a small group of technology executives deprived the President of the United States of its most influential broadcast tools, restricting his ability to command attention and conduct the news cycle of his cell phone at any time.
For more than four years, Trump has taken advantage of his social media accounts to boost the news cycle, set policies, move markets and irritate his base, often issuing statements or making statements before his advisers were aware of his plans. In a short time, he lost almost all access to his favorite microphone.
Twitter and Facebook were the first of many companies to take action. In the days that followed, Google suspended Trump’s YouTube channel, Reddit banned some pro-Trump forums, and Snapchat, which had already limited Trump’s activity on its network, announced that it would permanently ban its account from 20 January, the last day of his presidency.
Since then, Trump’s presence in the moving news cycle has been relatively minimal. He was forced to release videos and statements in the media, in official statements and, on Wednesday, on the White House Twitter account, which has only 26 million followers, less than a third of the public he commanded through his account. folks . (Twitter said Trump’s use of the White House account did not violate his ban.) Otherwise, barely heard of Trump.
Executives at Facebook, Twitter and other companies say they believe they made the right decisions, but they also have reservations about their own power.
“The cost of this decision is that it clarifies the fact that a small group of individuals can make these decisions,” said a Facebook executive involved in the deliberations on suspending Trump’s account.
Platforms were not the only companies to highlight how the power of the internet is concentrated. Shortly after Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts, tech companies even more central to the internet flexed their muscles: Apple and Google removed Parler, a popular social networking app among Trump supporters, from their app stores for failing to avoid violent speech, and Amazon stopped hosting the app on its AWS web hosting service. Parler Chief Executive John Matze said on Wednesday that the app, which has 12 million users, may never return.
In a long topic on Twitter this weekDorsey said Twitter’s decision to ban Trump could set a “dangerous” precedent, highlighting “the power that an individual or company has over a part of the global public conversation”.
But he also pointed to companies that control more than just their own platforms.
“This moment may demand that dynamic, but in the long run it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open Internet,” said Dorsey of the decisions of Apple, Google and Amazon. “A company that makes the decision to moderate is different from a government that removes access, but can feel the same way.”
Trump and his allies also raised the alarm about the moves. Trump in a video posted on the official White House Twitter account Wednesday, criticized “efforts to censor, cancel and blacklist our fellow citizens.”
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Democratic lawmakers, including those who have long criticized the growing power of big tech companies, appear to be less concerned about the platforms’ actions against Trump and his supporters. They note that the First Amendment does not prohibit private companies from deciding what to host on their platforms and applaud the suspensions – some believe it should have happened earlier.
“Platforms are companies. They have agreements with users,” said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., A vocal advocate for greater regulation of big technologies. “When someone is violating the platform’s standards, they should be held accountable.”
Both companies have long been making special rules for Trump and other world leaders, claiming that even their most controversial posts have significant news value. Most of Trump’s controversial posts remained on the platforms, sometimes behind warning labels, sometimes not.
The Facebook and Twitter decisions were a response to a very specific situation, sources at both companies said. A specifically influential actor was inciting violence and threatening the democratic process, and his words were having a demonstrable effect in the real world.
Twitter didn’t just say that Trump’s words can inspire people to violence. He also cited “multiple indicators” that these words were “being received and understood” as an incitement to violence.
Now, the precedent has been set. And while platforms may never again be in such a dire and dire situation as they faced last week, the world has seen how much energy technology companies exercise and realized that their executives can take drastic action when necessary – changing the course world history of tropical retreats in the Pacific Ocean – without any external laws or guidelines.
“This is not normal,” said a Facebook executive. “These are extraordinary circumstances. We don’t have a policy on what to do when an incumbent president starts a coup.”