Stop the tweet . . .
The spreading of disinformation has been a thing throughout the Donald Trump’s presidency – so why has it taken big tech so long to act, asks David Court. Big tech finally free to act
There was a time, not so long ago, when writing about technology was a simple job. Shiny new products, mainly smartphones, were the most exciting thing us tech journalists got to cover, allowing us to geek out about pixel counts, megabits, chipsets and other things that in the grand scheme of things really don’t matter.
And, to be fair, this still is the job most of the time. But this week, covering technology was a little different. The brands I’ve been covering closely for the past decades did something extraordinary.
One by one they took action to defend the world’s most-celebrated democracy.
Are they qualified to do this? No way. Apple started off by selling hand-built computers from a garage. Google was created in a university dorm room, as was Facebook. Twitter was, essentially, a failed podcasting company. And Amazon is an online bookstore gone berserk.
When you strip these companies back to their origins, they look like a pretty rag-tag bunch. And yet, this week they’re arguably more powerful than the President of the United States.
Facebook and Twitter finally banned United States President Donald Trump’s account for repeat rule-breaking offences, while Apple and Google removed the Twitteralternative
platform Parler from their respective app stores for incitements to violence and lack of content moderation.
Amazon went one step further, cutting the pro-Trump social network from its cloud-hosting service AWS (Amazon Web Services).
Whether that was the right thing to do or not will be debated. Probably in a US court. What I find interesting, though, is where these companies have finally drawn the line.
An attempted coup d’etat on their home country seems to be that line. Which is interesting because failed coup d’etats are not covered in the terms and conditions of Apple, Amazon, Google, Twitter etc in any detail.
The way big tech treated Parler is interesting too. Don’t get me wrong, I was delighted to see it kicked into touch like it was. Good riddance, I say. But I also recognise that it received heavy-handed treatment that others have not.
You don’t have to go very far at all to find examples of incitements to violence and lack of content moderation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google search results. Basically anywhere on the internet. Parler probably has the right to feel a bit hard done by here, though I couldn’t care less.
The more pertinent question is: why has it taken big tech so long to act?
Trump tweeting disinformation has been a thing for his entire presidency. It’s not a new thing. The answer to this question, I think, is something called Section 230.
This refers to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that, in short, protects tech companies from being liable for what users post on their platforms.
Banning Donald Trump from Twitter any sooner than this week wouldn’t have been a pragmatic move.
If he was no longer able to spread his message via the world’s biggest social media platforms, I think it’s fair to assume that he would try to use his executive power – as he did with Huawei – to bring down the platforms that banned him.
Twitter (and Facebook), in my opinion, was trapped, forced multiple times to make exceptions for Trump’s rule breaking for fear of strict regulation that would grind its business to a standstill.
Now, with Trump leaving office in a few days and several of his party members in the Senate distancing themselves from him, Twitter, and the rest of big tech, was finally in a position where it was able to act.
Safe in the knowledge that the person who would be affected most by their actions (Trump himself) would be unable to retaliate.
Twitter (and Facebook) was trapped, forced multiple times to make exceptions for Trump’s rule breaking for fear of strict regulation that would grind its business to a standstill.