In the wake of the January 6 deadly riot at the United States Capitol, which President Donald Trump has heavily promoted on social media, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and others have finally moved to ban the president.
The result? A sudden drop in the online spread of electoral misinformation.
According to a survey by Zignal Labs, reported by the Washington Post on Saturday, online misinformation about electoral fraud fell 73 percent within a week after Twitter’s decision to ban Trump on January 8.
Which means that insofar as the shift and elimination of conspiracy reports from the right aimed to curb misinformation, the ban seems to be working. Not only has the spread of misinformation slowed, the survey indicates that online discussion around the topics that motivated the Capitol riot has also decreased.
“Zignal found that the use of hashtags affiliated with the Capitol riot has also declined considerably,” writes the Post, summarizing Zignal’s research. “Mentions to the hashtag #FightforTrump, widely deployed on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media services in the week prior to the rally, fell 95%. #HoldTheLine and the term ‘March for Trump’ also fell by more than 95 percent. “
The main argument against Trump’s ban was that, despite conspiracy theories, defamation and misinformation that he spent years spreading on Twitter and other platforms, as president of the United States, it was important for social media companies to allow him to communicate freely with the public.
But that line of thought became more tenuous in the weeks following Trump’s election defeat to Joe Biden, as the president’s posts increasingly focused on spreading lies about the election being stolen from him and fomenting unrest, including the promotion of “Stop the Steal” on 6 January protest that preceded the violent takeover of the Capitol.
The breaking point finally came in the days after the violence. Instead of unequivocally denouncing the troublemakers, Trump defended them, writing in a tweet he posted while police were still trying to clean up the Capitol on January 6 that “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred and overwhelming election victory is so unceremoniously & violently stripped. ”
(Hours earlier, Trump posted a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence, even as protesters, some of them shouting “Hang Mike Pence”, had been dangerously close to meeting the Vice President while he was being hastily evacuated from the Senate chamber. )
Then, on January 8, Trump posted a tweet announcing that he would not attend the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20. Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account hours later, writing in a blog post that his inaugural tweet was being interpreted online by his supporters as “an incentive for those who potentially consider violent acts that possession would be a ‘safe’ target, since he will not attend.”
(Facebook has so far only suspended Trump’s account until the end of his presidential term.)
For the next eight days, Trump resorted to the disclosure of tweet-like statements through the White House press office. He characterized the actions of Facebook, Twitter and others as an attack on freedom of expression, but at no time did he retract or apologize for spreading misinformation about the election – nor did he acknowledge the reality that Biden’s victory over him was legitimate.
Trump would have considered opening an account with Parler, a social media platform favored by conservatives and many on the far right for his lax approach to moderating content, where extremism flourishes.
But Amazon withdrew Parler from its web hosting service after revelations that Trump supporters used him as a forum to organize the Capitol riot, and it is unclear whether he will return online.
Meanwhile, news circulates that Trump is spending his last days in the White House isolated and bitter. It turns out that watching cable news isn’t so much fun when you can’t provide live commentary on it to your tens of millions of Twitter followers. Nor does it seem that disinformation thrives when its biggest suppliers are on platforms.