As the world adjusts to a Twitter without @realdonaldtrump, the next big question is, “Now what?”
Major technology platforms, long accused of giving President Donald Trump special treatment not assigned to regular users, have dismissed him in the wake of his incitement to violence by supporters in the Capitol on January 6. He’s gone from Twitter, Facebook to Snapchat – even Shopify.
But in many ways, starting the president was the easy part.
Will companies now hold other world leaders to the same standard? Will they continue to decide what is and isn’t allowed on their platforms, potentially alienating large chunks of their user base? Will all of this lead to further online fragmentation, pushing those who flirt with extreme views to marginal sites and secret chat groups?
While they have long tried to remain neutral, Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms are slowly waking up to the active role they and their algorithms have played in shaping a modern world full of polarized, angry groups and massive factions falling for fake conspiracies and misinformation about science, politics and medicine.
“What we see is a shift of the platforms from a standpoint of absolute freedom of speech, to an understanding of speech moderation as a public health issue,” said civil media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
None of this can be resolved quickly or never. Certainly not by blocking a president with only a few days to go.
But there are blueprints for future action. Do you remember “Plandemic?” That was the slickly produced, 26-minute, misinformation-ridden video promoting COVID-19 conspiracies that seemingly popped up out of nowhere and garnered millions of views in a few days. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube tried to remove it – too late. But they were ready for the sequel, which didn’t attract even a fraction of the first’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 voting is an attack on our democracy.”
Unsurprisingly, it has been easier for tech giants to act decisively on public health issues than in politics. Corporate bans from the US President and his supporters have led to loud, if generally unfounded, censorship calls and allegations of left-wing bias. It has even received criticism from European leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel – not exactly a friend of Trump’s.
Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said freedom of opinion is a fundamental right of “elementary meaning.”
“This fundamental right can be intervened, but according to the law and within the framework set by legislators – not according to a decision of the management of social media platforms,” he told reporters in Berlin. “From this angle, the Chancellor considers it problematic that the US president’s accounts are now permanently frozen.”
From that German perspective, it should be the government, not private companies such as Facebook and Twitter, who decide what constitutes dangerous language on social platforms. That 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 policies on privately-owned communications platforms.
Governments, of course, remain free to regulate technology companies, another area of fermentation. In the past year, Trump, other Republicans, and some Democrats have called for the repeal of a fundamental 1996 legal provision known as Section 230. That protects social platforms, which can host trillions of posts, so they can’t be forgotten by someone who feels harmed by something someone else posted. But so far there has been more heat than light on the matter.
Still, few are happy with the often slow, hindsight three-strikes and suspensions that have characterized Twitter and Facebook for years. Especially in light of the Capitol uprising, the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally and live-streamed mass shootings.
Sarita Schoenebeck, a University of Michigan professor who focuses on online harassment, said it may be time for platforms to re-evaluate how they access problematic material on their sites.
“For years, platforms have been evaluating what types of content are appropriate or not by evaluating the content individually, without considering the broader social and cultural context in which it takes place,” she said. “We need to rethink 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 First Amendment at Southern Methodist University, thinks the Trump bans will encourage his base of followers to move to other social platforms where they can organize and interact with less or less no limits.
“It is likely that the bans will fuel the us-versus-them story – and it is also likely that other forums will get a boost in traffic, as we saw after the 2020 election,” he said. “The bans have taken away the best tools for organizing people and for Trump to address the largest audience, but these are by no means the only tools.”