Brave Dorsey stalked by Trump
BRAVE Jack Dorsey. Courageous Jack Dorsey. Foolish Jack Dorsey. Naive Jack Dorsey. Last Friday, Twitter finally took action against an incendiary Donald Trump tweet. It slapped a notice on the US president’s tweet warning that it “violated Twitter’s rules about glorifying violence”.
The tweet had been a threat against protesters and rioters in Minnesota that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.
Twitter then went further by restricting the tweet and disallowing any replies, likes or straight retweets. Retweets with comments were allowed.
As expected, Trump was enraged. He blasted Twitter on Friday morning for allowing “lies” and “propaganda” from China and accusing the social network of “targeting Republicans, Conservatives and the President of the United States”.
But if Twitter or CEO Dorsey were hoping that they would immediately emerge as heroes, they should have known better.
That may yet happen. But while some applauded the move, more either took it for granted — “jeez, what took you so long?” — or berated Dorsey for not suspending Trump’s account altogether.
The critics admittedly have a point: if a normal citizen tweeted what Trump did, they would probably be removed or censured.
Dorsey, if he didn’t know it already, is learning the same lesson that Mark Zuckerberg has swallowed over the last five years: you won’t necessarily get credit for doing things that people say they want.
For his part, Zuckerberg’s intervention in the affair was particularly unfortunate. He gave an interview to the right-wing US cable network Fox News, saying that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter shouldn’t be the “arbiters of truth”.
While that’s actually a defensible point, making it there and then was like pouring petrol onto a bonfire. It instantly piled more right-wing pressure on Dorsey and Twitter.
Trump and his officials approvingly cited Zuckerberg’s intervention before setting an online mob on Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, with the US president tweeting that the Twitter executive was a biased “hater”.
At the time of going to press, it wasn’t yet clear whether any meaningful further punitive action against Twitter was forthcoming from the White House.
But in Dorsey’s favour, it looks almost certain that the US president will be forced to either back down after some more blustering or simply drop the issue and pretend that his protest was action in itself.
One awkward reality for the US president is just how singularly dependent he actually is on Twitter.
In Bob Woodward’s excellent fly-onthe-wall book chronicling Trump’s first year in office, time and again Trump reminds aides and associates how much he relies on Twitter as his personal “megaphone”.
He simply doesn’t use Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat (remember Snapchat?) in anything like the same way. And he hates and distrusts most of the press, even his beloved Fox News. So he tweets and the world reports.
But that’s not the only reason Dorsey probably has the upper hand in this face-off.
The actual legal avenue Trump has suggested — an executive order seeking to reclassify social media platforms as publishers instead of neutral platforms — is virtually guaranteed to fail in the US courts.
This is the verdict of almost every legal mind to look at the issue in recent days.
Even if it was a runner, it would have precisely the opposite effect that Trump says he wants, unfettered free speech with less oversight.
Faced with a new array of legal threats, Twitter would be even more likely to bin his tweets or take him off altogether.
So it looks like a bluff from Trump. If so, he might be setting Dorsey up as a new role model. From being constantly beleaguered and harried for every ill and harm that is perpetrated on Twitter, Dorsey may now become the guy who tamed Trump.
At a time when every major tech leader is being assailed on some major societal charge — Google and Apple on appeasing China, Amazon on workers’ rights, Facebook for just about everything — Dorsey morphs into the principled one.
Of course, it may fork a different way. If he thinks he has little to lose (a bad poll rating just before November’s presidential election, for example) Trump could double down with even more outrageous Twitter commentary, forcing Dorsey to remove him from the platform altogether.
While some would cheer, Dorsey knows that this would be the biggest hit to Twitter in recent years. They hate to admit it internally in Twitter, but Trump has made the tech platform a required utility for tens of millions of political hacks, pundits, journalists and activists.
It would (and will) survive without him, but it’s surely hard to wave goodbye to one of your biggest single user magnets.
Should other platforms have supported Twitter in solidarity? That’s a point increasingly made by some, such as the campaigning veteran journalist and New York Times columnist Kara Swisher.
But what exactly would they do? Issue a joint statement in support of Twitter’s action against Trump’s tweet?
If the US president used Facebook in the same exclusive way and Zuckerberg came under similar pressure from him, would Twitter and other networks feel inclined to come to Facebook’s support?
It’s doubtful. Dorsey is on his own here. But maybe that will prove to be a good thing.