As the world adjusts to a Twitter without @realdonaldtrump, the next big question is, “Now what?”
The main technology platforms, long accused of giving President Donald Trump special treatment not accorded regular users, showed him the door after his incitement to violence by supporters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. He left Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat – even Shopify.
But in many ways, starting the president was the easy part.
Will companies now keep other world leaders in the same pattern? Will they decide what is or is not allowed on their platforms, potentially alienating much of their user base? Will all of this lead to more fragmentation online, pushing those who are flirting with extreme views to marginal sites and secret chat groups?
Although they have long sought to remain neutral, Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms are slowly waking up to the active role that they and their algorithms played in shaping a modern world full of angry and polarized groups and huge factions falling into false conspiracies and disinformation about science, politics and medicine.
“What we are seeing is a shift from platforms from a free speech absolutism stance to an understanding of speech moderation as a public health issue,” said professor of civic media Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
None of this can be fixed soon, or ever. Certainly not blocking a president with only a few days to go.
But there are plans for future action. Remember “Plandemic?” This was the cleverly produced 26-minute video filled with incorrect information promoting COVID-19 conspiracies that appeared out of nowhere and garnered millions of views in a matter of days. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube struggled to get it out – too late. But they were ready for the sequel, which failed to attract even a fraction of the former’s attention.
“Sharing disinformation about COVID is a danger because it makes it harder for us to fight the disease,” said Zuckerman. “Likewise, sharing disinformation about the vote is an attack on our democracy.”
Unsurprisingly, it has been easier for tech giants to act decisively on public health issues than on politics. Corporate bans from the President of the United States and his supporters have generated loud, though generally unfounded, screams of censorship, as well as accusations of left-wing bias. It even drew criticism from European leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel – not exactly a friend of Trump’s.
Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said that freedom of opinion is a fundamental right of “elementary meaning”.
“This fundamental right may be subject to intervention, but according to the law and within the framework defined by lawmakers – not according to a decision by the administration of the social media platforms,” he told reporters in Berlin. “Seen from this angle, the chancellor considers it problematic that the US president’s accounts are now permanently blocked.”
In this German perspective, it should be the government, and not private companies like Facebook and Twitter, who decide what counts as a dangerous speech on social platforms. This approach may be feasible in Europe, but it is much more complicated in the US, where the First Amendment to the US Constitution protects freedom of expression from government interference, although not corporate policy on private communication platforms.
Governments, of course, remain free to regulate technology companies, another area of fermentation. Last year, Trump, other Republicans and some Democrats called for the repeal of a fundamental 1996 legal provision known as Section 230. This protects social platforms, which can host trillions of messages, from being processed to oblivion by anyone who feels wronged by something someone else posted. But so far there has been more heat than light on the subject.
Still, few are happy with the crashes and suspensions, often slow and following three strikes that have characterized Twitter and Facebook for years. Particularly in light of the Capitol uprising, the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017 and mass shootings broadcast live.
Sarita Schoenebeck, a professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on online harassment, said it may be time for platforms to reassess how they approach problematic material on their websites.
“For years, platforms have assessed which types of content are appropriate or not, evaluating content in isolation, without considering the broader social and cultural context in which it occurs,” she said. “We need to revisit this approach. We must rely on a combination of democratic principles, community governance and platform rules to shape behavior ”.
Jared Schroeder, a social media expert and the First Amendment at Southern Methodist University, thinks the Trump ban will encourage his follower base to move towards other social platforms where they can organize and communicate with less – if any – restrictions.
“Prohibitions are likely to fuel the us-against-them narrative – and other forums are also likely to see an increase in traffic, as we saw after the 2020 election,” he said. “The bans took away the best tools for organizing people and for Trump to speak to the largest audience, but these are by no means the only tools.”