Shutting up Trump is a mistake
As Donald Trump leaves office in disgrace, denigrating the democratic ideals of the country he promised to make great again, he has also lost something far more important to him: his voice. Facebook deleted him and then Twitter “permanently suspended” his account. The platform which gave oxygen to his reality show-style presidency (as he, symbiotically, made them the most important free speech conduit in the world) said enough is enough.
I can see from my own Twitter timeline that many are delighted about this. Tired of his voice, rabblerousing, baseless claims of electoral fraud and, I daresay, monstrous capital letters and misplaced exclamation marks. Hillary Clinton greeted with a single “tick” the news that the man who beat her at the ballot box had been officially cancelled.
But this reaction is an error and a risk. It is an error because denying freedom of speech to undesirable world leaders does not help to defeat their views or quell their influence. It rather enhances it, investing them with a quality of martyrdom that is incendiary to their supporters, while denying the population at large the chance to disarm them intellectually and openly.
It is also a terrible risk to allow the speech of politicians to be switched off at the whim of unregulated Big Tech, informed by their anonymous “policy committees”, unaccountable to society at large. It should be a matter of concern that Twitter boss Jack Dorsey can intercede between voters and their leaders. For while most of us can agree that Trump behaved appallingly last week, what happens next week? What happens when the people and causes we champion are deleted?
If Mark Zuckerberg felt a Priti Patel speech on immigration was a violation? Or that we may no longer hear from Bibi Netanyahu or Jeremy Corbyn? The issue is not whether you like what they say, it is whether you should be entitled to hear it in the first place.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “Policy Lead”, admitted that her decisions were based on “trial and error”. They are a mass of moral contradictions: a doctor banned for offending vegans — but mouthpieces of the Chinese state remaining. There is no real accountability here, no guarantee of consistency or fairness that would follow from Twitter accepting it is a “publisher”.
If inciting violence is the threshold test, it is impossible to see how the Ayatollah Khamenei remains on Twitter where he defends Holocaust denial and calls for the State of Israel to be “eradicated”. The same point applies to Antifa and Extinction Rebellion and others.
Twitter is not a state broadcaster and is not obliged to broadcast anything. But what it should do is different from what it must. It should step back from censoring public figures, allowing sunlight to be the best disinfectant, especially in a democracy with speech restraints subject to the rule of law. To be a meaningful public space, social media should recognise that its power comes from enabling the public to interact with its leaders, not be hidden from them.