Maybe connecting people on such a massive scale wasn’t actually a good idea after all.
“Be there, will be wild!”
Last Wednesday, egged on by the deranged antics of the shameless narcissist and white supremacist that ascended to the highest office in the land, a mob of Trump supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol in order to “stop the steal”. Buoyed by the strength of their conviction that widespread voter fraud had been orchestrated to allow a — let me check my notes, moderate career Democrat, turn America into a socialist hellscape. Five people died. The entire developed world shook their heads in disbelief.
But obviously this wasn’t a singular, unique event.
Sure, the visual shock of the steps at the US Capitol being overrun by violent actors bearing the flag of a single corrupt individual is jarring. The sight of the legislative branch’s home being breached during the mundane formality of the certificate of ascertainment as prescribed by the 12th amendment. Something that probably gets lower ratings than when corn hole is on ESPN8…
We didn’t get here overnight. He had enablers. And a platform.
Well, at least he used to.
That’s Where the Line Is…
The through-line connecting the past two months of lies about a stolen election to the incitement from Trump’s January 6th rally to the events later that day are crystal clear.
But in the aftermath, slowly, and then all at once, the president’s most reliable forms of communication became off limits.
Twitter locked the president’s account that evening for 12 hours to prevent further provocations of violence. The next morning, Facebook and Instagram put a two week lock on his accounts there. And most dramatically, on Friday afternoon, Twitter ripped off the band-aid and permanently suspended @realdonaldtrump.
It feels a bit anti-climatic after four years of daily Terms of Service violations that were routinely justified with the commensurate logical gymnastics. Tedious posts on the Twitter Safety blog explaining how elected officials’ nuclear annihilation taunts were in the public interest and who were they to intervene?
But it finally happened.
The term of art for this is “deplatforming”. Frequently reserved for more extremist applications like Infowars, white nationalists and alt-right provocateurs, it means a private company choosing to not be the place for a user or type of content.
Deplatforming extends beyond allowing someone to have a profile on a social media site. It can mean a payments processor or other infrastructure provider that deems you or your organization too harmful to society, or more of a liability that you’re worth, and thus terminates your business relationship.
It’s delightful and the pure distillation of free market capitalism.
Designated Free Speech Area
But wait, you ask earnestly. “Doesn’t this fly in the face of the first amendment and our values as Americans?”
No.
No It doesn’t.
Follow-Up Question
Okay. Yes, you with the face.
“I thought the constitution protected free expression and free speech? Who allowed the unelected big tech elites to be the arbiters of truth and silence marginalized conservative voices?”
The first amendment protects you from the government curtailing your ability to speak freely. It does not, however, afford you a guaranteed platform on a private company’s service, nor does it require a company do business with you to amplify your message. And most clearly, it absolutely does not guarantee an audience.
When the first amendment was conceived, I don’t believe the founders had thought of a website (what’s a website?, they might ask plainly) that would buzz the phones of hundreds of millions of rectangles in the pockets of sweatpants across this great land. I mean, I know Alexander Hamilton was pretty cool, but that may just be revisionist history with a great soundtrack. Still, I’m guessing they weren’t considering that.
This gets the to the core of the manufactured controversy and talking point of the right, where yet another wedge is being hammered constantly to make a disproportionately powerful voting bloc feel weak and oppressed, when in fact, conservative voices have greater audiences than ever before.
Hate speech doesn’t have to have a home on the Internet. More troubling and directly related to the events of January 6th, fake news and willful lies about integrity of elections and faith in our democracy doesn’t deserve a guaranteed audience and mechanism for spread.
The reason we’re in this mess is that tools for mass communication conceived in a more idealistic and homogenous period (read: made for an used just by Bay Area dudes aged 25-34) were not designed with the foresight of how they could be abused or used to manipulate. Now we have to live in the world they created.
In early January 2021, we see some clearer reality forming, albeit a bit late.
Imperfect Timing
All the dominoes fell in rapid succession over just a day or two. Twitter, then Facebook, then Twitter again, YouTube, Stripe, Shopify, and others... One question does remain, and it’s one we’ll probably never had a straight answer to it.
Did this happen because of the violent insurrection, or because there were 14 days left in his term and there was little to lose?
The threat of an unpredictable executive with a regulatory axe to grind waning, and perhaps a hope of fomenting goodwill with a more conventionally lobby-able administration.
Any unquestionably principled stance would have needed to act much earlier in this mess. Half measures like fact-check labels were implemented when the actual solution was on the table the entire time. An option not exercised until the train was off the tracks.
Implications
The big question that everyone will have to contend with is this: are we collectively okay with private companies being able to decide what is and isn’t acceptable on their platforms. Which opinions are too extreme, too politically incorrect, unsettling, hateful, progressive, revolutionary, whatever adjective is important to you?
There are two answers here, or rather, two hypothetical classes of people that this could apply to. In the case of our dumb, hate-filled, game show president, it was irrelevant the entire time. Twitter did not have to enable this garbage fire for four years and the idea that the chief executive of the most powerful country in the world exists and communicates on the periphery and at the largess of a bird company in San Francisco is nonsense.
The president and other government officials have no shortage of official channels and legacy media players to use to disseminate their message. If Donald Trump had requested time on the major television networks every night to say the garbage he doled our in 140 characters, the charade would have been over long ago. The media was and continues to be an enabler, but Twitter never needed to be. They pulled the trigger when it barely mattered. Sure the catharsis was there, but it was ultimately ideologically impotent and unsatisfying.
The more valid question is the second one. How comfortable are we with private media platforms and infrastructure providers deciding what is and is not allowed? This is trickier, but we can’t err on the side of enabling actual nazis and bad actors indefinitely to avoid appearing like a company has an ethical point of view. As long as the core of a free and open internet persists, no voice is entirely silenced. But mass, unchecked distribution of a message can and should be curated and managed, especially when it leads to a failed coup and direct attack on the fundamental underpinnings of a functioning democracy.