If only it were so simple
Banishing Trump won’t clean up social media – we all have to think harder about where our clicks and shares can lead, says Hugo Rifkind.
Me and Donald Trump, we have a lot in common. For I, too, have been banned from Twitter, albeit not recently. It was a couple of years ago, after I’d had an argument with a white supremacist and told him to stick a cactus up his bottom. According to the algorithm, I’d been ‘‘promoting self-harm’’.
Never mind me and my cactus, though, because we’ll come back to that. The difficult question of late is whether Twitter should have been allowed to ban Donald Trump, the US president himself.
The reason why this question is difficult is not because it has no answer. It is because it has two answers and they are completely different, and this is because Twitter is a new thing. And, while it would be helpful if new things were exactly like old things, annoyingly they more often aren’t. So if Twitter is like the old thing that is, say, Speakers’ Corner, then his banning is an outrage. Whereas if, by contrast, we feel Twitter is more like a private publisher, then it should be free to publish – or not publish – whatever it damn well likes.
The trouble is, you can go half-mad trying to decide which one of these old things Twitter is, for the very simple reason that it is neither of them. You might as well debate whether a helicopter is a bicycle or a horse.
Consider, in this context, the mob who invaded the Capitol. If there were an old thing they were like, then it would either be the Brownshirts or Les Miserables, depending on your perspective. Except, is that really what was going on? Like, really, really? Many of these people had filmed themselves, as one might on safari, or whitewater rafting. They’d booked flights and hotels, like it was a city break. Then, after attempting to overthrow the state, and failing, and boasting about it, they go to airports under their own names, where they’re genuinely startled to run into the FBI.
What did they think was going to happen? You have a daytrip revolution and then you go back to work at the propane store in Tampa? Yes, there were bombs and guns and five people died, but there was also hobbyism here, and make-believe. Many seem to have been radicalised by the online conspiracy cult QAnon, which has often been likened to a role-playing game, complete with a Hollywood narrative and puzzle-solving. Maybe that guy with the horns was having a revolution in the same way that an Instagram influencer has a holiday in Dubai – as a projection, all for the likes. And yet the influencer really does, along the way, go to Dubai. And the Capitol really does get stormed.
Then there’s the president. It would be madness to suggest that his tweets don’t matter. They have shifted stockmarkets and geopolitics and he could very easily have spent the last 10 days of his presidency tweeting America into flames. How much, though, does each one of them matter to him? As much as a statement which has been to his officials and lawyers and back again? As much as a proclamation by a Roman emperor, carved into rock?
It is not impossible to adjust our mindsets to fit the internet age. It just takes a bit of work. Think, for example, of child pornography. Specifically, think back to the first time you realised that, when you read a report of somebody convicted of ‘‘making’’ an indecent image, they might have just downloaded one and been nowhere near an actual child at all. It can be hard to grasp, at first, that something so easy to do – just looking, like turning a page – could really be such a terrible offence.
By now, though, you probably comprehend that if downloading an image of abuse is not to be a grave offence, then we might as well give up on controlling such things altogether. Consider, also, the downloading of terrorist literature, or of plans for your 3D printer to make a gun, or a vengeful ex-lover uploading a nude. We have powers we are slow to recognise, to do harm we are slow to understand.
Two things seem obvious to me and one is that our expectations, laws and regulations on all of this are simply archaic. When it comes to Twitter and Trump, as I have written before, my own view is that Twitter can kick him off if it likes and should have done so years ago. Yet when it comes to Google and Apple banning the wilder Twitter alternative Parler from their stores, my certainty begins to ebb. Now, it has fallen from the internet altogether, due to Amazon unilaterally refusing to host it and that, I’m pretty sure, is a free speech catastrophe. Yet I’m also well aware that there is close to zero public or political comprehension of what most of this paragraph even means, and nor is there likely to be for years. If it helps, it’s like the difference between banning somebody from using your car, refusing to sell them another car and banning them from using the roads.
The second obvious thing, though, is that laws and regulations aren’t the big answer. There will always be anarchy on the internet and if the easily accessible dark web can still host child pornography and drug dealing then there will always be space for a soccer mom who merely wants to be told that Hillary Clinton eats babies.
A change in social media regulation would calm things down but equally vital is a change in all of us. We need to understand what a click is, and what a share is, and where our rants and raves and hobbyist outrage can lead. New things aren’t like old things. Maybe I was promoting self-harm. That’s the rub.