Trump’s Twitter Ban and its Global Impact
Op-Ed by Albert Geokgeuzian, Staff Writer
January 13th, 2021
Donald Trump has officially been banned from Twitter after the events of January 6th and the role he played in the insurrection of the US capitol. In the immediate aftermath of the events, Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts for 12 hours and they said that further violations of it’s Terms of Service would result in a permanent ban. Trump did violate Twitter’s ToS again and therefore was subsequently banned permanently.
There have been a few reasons people have gotten upset over this, the first being that this is a violation of the US first amendment. That’s not true, the first amendment says that congress shall make no law to obstruct freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean that private businesses can’t have policies regarding what you can say on their platform. If someone came into your house and started saying things you don't like, you have every legal right to kick that person out of your house; that's not infringing on the other person's freedom of speech.
The second reason being that Trump is a world leader and governmental officials have to have special privileges on these platforms; and they do, Trump could’ve been banned years ago, but he wasn’t because he is a world leader. However everything has a tipping point, and Twitter’s was the January 6 insurrection. It might then be said that these platforms have too much power over us, and allowing them to control so much of the information that billions of people see is terrible.
That’s true, however there is more nuance here. Let’s get one thing clear, Trump’s ban was right, because he showed no regard to public interest and didn’t seem to regret it afterwards. If platforms can’t ban world leaders no matter what, then it could create a situation like that in Myanmar, who have used Facebook as a way to start a genocide. A secret operation by the Myanmar government used Facebook to incite violence among its population and commit genocide against the Rohingya, something that Facebook itself admitted.
How was Facebook used in that operation? Disinformation campaigns, Facebook did more in the 2020 US election than it did during the 2016 election but it still wasn’t enough. These platforms are set up such that those with the most interaction garner the biggest boost by the algorithm, and what type of content gets the most interaction? Anger. Couple that with the fact that lies spread faster than truth, then you have platforms that specialize with spreading angry lies to people who are most likely to share them even further. This idea is perfectly put by Sacha Baron Cohen at the 2019 ADL Never Is Now Summit, he said: “demagogues appeal to our worst instincts … it’s as if the age of reason, the era of evidential argument is ending and now knowledge is increasingly delegitimized, and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which relies on shared lies, is on the march.”
As such, social media companies have become the biggest propaganda machine in history. 6 people at Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Sundar Pichai at Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Brin’s ex sister-in-law at YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, “The Silicon Six”.
These 6 individuals control the information that billions of people see on a daily basis, governments can use the mechanisms on these platforms to bombard users with propaganda, if the Nazis had been around in the digital revolution, they would have ruled the world.
Trump’s ban must be a start, the elected leaders of the world’s government must pressure these companies to start changing its ways and put in safeguards against malicious content. One simple way would be to classify these 6 companies as they really are, publishing platforms. The benefit of classifying these companies as publishing platforms is that they now must conform to rules and regulation set in publishing. You can’t publish a newspaper article with a headline that says “ ‘X’ Is Corrupt” without providing any evidence, mainly because of defamation laws that have been set.
If these companies aren’t looked at as publishers and are allowed to leave any type of content as long as it comes from a “world leader”, then democracy will cease to exist, and propagandas, bots, and trolls will dominate our lives. Trump’s ban was necessary, but more actions are imperative. If we don’t move now, we could lose everything.