Decisions belong in public sphere

Views from around the world. These opinions are not necessarily shared by Stuff newspapers.

Kicking Donald Trump off social media platforms was the right thing to do, but it sets a dangerous precedent. Don’t take our word for it. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, worries that silencing as important a political player as Trump ‘‘fragments the public conversation’’ and ‘‘sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation’’.

Exactly. No tears will be shed in this corner over the fact that Trump no longer has the megaphone of Twitter to spread his political poison far and wide. But it should not be up to the likes of Dorsey, or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, to effectively set the limits of permissible speech in the public square of the 21st century. Especially, it must be said, when those very same tech titans have profited immensely from a business model that fostered the spread of misinformation, outright lies, hatred and extremism of all kinds.

No, those decisions, at least the framework for how to make them, belong in the public sphere. They should be debated publicly and ultimately decided on by our elected representatives.

Governments should take responsibility on behalf of us all for defining the contours of contemporary democratic debate where it actually takes place for the most part: on social media.