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 shown him the door after his incitement to violence by supporters of the U.S. Capitol on 6 gener. He has left Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, even Shopify.
But in many ways, uprooting the president was the easiest.
Will companies now maintain other world leaders with the same standard? Will they continue to decide what is not allowed on their platforms and can alienate large strips of their user base? Will all this lead to more online splitting, pushing those who flirt with extreme views of marginal sites and secret chat groups?
While they have long tried to stay neutral, Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms are slowly waking up to the active role they and their algorithms have played in forming a modern world full of polarized groups and angry and huge factions falling into false conspiracies. misinformation about science, politics and medicine.
“What we are seeing is a shift from platforms from a stance of free speech absolutism to an understanding of speech moderation as a public health issue,” the media professor said. civic Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
None of this will be fixed soon, if ever. Certainly not blocking a president when he has a few days left to finish his term.
But there are plans for future actions. Remember “Plandemic?” This was the 26-minute, uninformed video, which promoted the COVID-19 conspiracies that appeared out of nowhere and garnered millions of views. in a matter of days. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube struggled to remove it, too late. But they were prepared for the sequel, which failed to attract even a fraction of the attention of the former.
“Sharing misinformation about COVID is a danger because it makes it harder for us to fight the disease,” Zuckerman said. “Similarly, sharing misinformation about voting is an attack on our democracy.”
Not surprisingly, it has been easier for the tech giants to act decisively in public health than in politics. Corporate bans from the U.S. president and his supporters have sparked loud, though generally unfounded, cries of censorship, as well as accusations of left-wing bias. It has even attracted criticism from European leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel – He’s not exactly a friend of Trump.
Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said freedom of opinion is a fundamental right of “elementary importance”.
“This fundamental right can be intervened, but in accordance with the law and within the framework defined by lawmakers, not according to a decision of the management of social media platforms,” he told reporters in Berlin. “Seen from this angle, the chancellor finds it problematic that the accounts of the president of the United States have been permanently blocked.”
From this German perspective, it should be the government, and not private companies like Facebook and Twitter, that decide what is the dangerous discourse of social platforms. This approach might be feasible in Europe, but it is much more complicated in the United States, where the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of expression from government interference, though not from corporate policy on communication platforms. privately owned.
Governments, of course, remain free to regulate technology companies, another area of fermentation. Over the past year, Trump, other Republicans, and some Democrats have called for repealing a 1996 fundamental legal provision known as Article 230.. This protects social platforms, which can host billions of messages, from being sued for oblivion by anyone who feels unjustified by something someone has posted. But so far there has been more heat than light on the subject.
Still, few are happy with the eliminations and suspensions of three often slow, after-reality strikes that have characterized Twitter and Facebook for years. Particularly in light of the Capitol uprising, the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017 and the live mass shootings.
Sarita Schoenebeck, a University of Michigan professor who focuses on online harassment, said it might be time for platforms to re-evaluate how they approach problematic material from their sites.
“For years, platforms have assessed what types of content are appropriate or not by evaluating content in isolation, regardless of the broader social and cultural context in which it takes place,” he said. “We need to review this approach. We should rely on a combination of democratic principles, community governance and platform rules to model behavior. “
Jared Schroeder, an expert on social media and the first amendment from Southern Methodist University, believes Trump’s bans will encourage his fan base to move to other social platforms where they can organize and communicate with fewer restrictions (yes there are).
“Prohibitions are likely to feed the narrative against us and other forums are also likely to get increased 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 speak to the wider audience, but these are by no means the only tools.”