Twitter not Trump’s top target — it’s the liberals
President Trump’s executive action aimed at social media companies like Twitter isn’t so much about Twitter. It is about getting reelected — and there are few better ways to rally his base than to rail on California liberals in Silicon Valley.
The president has little to lose by taking a shot at the San Francisco tech company and outfits such as Facebook because the Bay Area, as well as Silicon Valley and California in general, overwhelmingly supports Democrats, contributes to their campaigns and dislikes Trump. So Trump revs up his base by ripping on Big Tech — even though Big Tech helped get him elected.
Who said that? Trump’s campaign manager,
Brad Parscale.
Parscale said the Trump campaign raised much of its $250 million online haul in 2016 through a robust Facebook advertising push. He also said Trump had masterfully used Twitter to steer the media narrative during the campaign. The president is still using his 80 millionfollower Twitter feed to shape the story — his feud with Jack Dorsey and company is competing this week for top billing with the nearly unfathomable milestone of 100,000 Americans killed by COVID19.
“Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” Parscale told Wired magazine in the days after Trump’s 2016 election. “Twitter for Mr. Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.”
But that sort of nuance doesn’t rile up Trump’s GOP base. Railing on tech companies as biased against conservatives does.
A Morning Consult poll last year of Republicans found that 48% felt Facebook was biased against conservatives and 36% felt Twitter was anticonservative. And that was before Twitter stuck “fact checks” debunking a pair of Trump’s tweets this week making incorrect claims about California’s plans to have a nearly allmail election in November. That’s what triggered Trump’s order Thursday that would remove a provision of a 24yearold federal law protecting tech companies from lawsuits over content on their platforms.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers,” Trump said before signing the order, referring to the “tech monopoly” that has “unchecked power.”
To Trump, railing on Silicon Valley generates the same reaction as pounding other “elites” like the media and Democratic governors who don’t want to open the their states for business quickly enough. It’s a wellworn tactic that has kept his conservative base with him through threeplus years in office.
“California is an easy target for conservatives because of the image that we’re ‘freaky San Francisco’ and Hollywood people,” said Donnie Fowler, a former Democratic operative who has worked to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington for two decades and is now the CEO at Tech4America. “It reinforces their messages.”
Trump’s latest blast at Silicon Valley started with another shot at California. On Tuesday, Trump took on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to mail ballots to all California voters for the November election, breaking at least temporarily from the detente the two had stuck to during the pandemic.
Trump tweeted that “there is NO WAY (ZERO!) that MailIn Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.”
Twitter pointed out, accurately in its fact check, that that is false. Evidence of voter fraud
“is very rare” anywhere, including California, UC Irvine election law Professor Rick Hasen told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast.
“In the five states that use allmail balloting — which include some heavily Republican states like Utah — the amount of election crime generally is very low,” Hasen said.
That didn’t matter to the president. Trump exploded after Twitter attached its fact check, tweeting that “Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election. If that happens, we no longer have our freedom.”
But Zack Graves, policy director at the libertarianleaning Lincoln Network think tank that links Silicon Valley and Washington, said there’s a disconnect between how many Republicans feel about bias at technology companies and how they feel about regulating them.
That Morning Consult poll last year of Republicans, which his group commissioned, found that 41% of respondents agreed that “technology platforms should be free from government regulation regardless of political or ideological bias, because they are private companies.” Forty percent said tech companies “need to be regulated by the government to stop political or ideological bias.”
“My view is that conservatives are not upset by content moderation itself, they’re distrustful of progressives in San Francisco having massive and opaque power over it,” Graves said in an email Thursday.
Harvard government Professor Thomas Patterson doesn’t think Trump “is that fearful of Twitter. It’s just a good excuse to go after them.”
“But he is very fearful, and rightfully so, of vote by mail,” said Patterson, author of the new book “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself ? And Why It Needs to Reclaim Its Conservative Ideals.”
Why? Patterson thinks it’s because Trump believes it could hurt his reelection chances by making it easier for more people to vote.
“If you ever agreed to it,” Trump told Fox News in March, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
That, too, is untrue. Just ask California’s newest member of Congress, Rep. Mike Garcia. The Republican businessman easily won a nearly allmail House election in Southern California this month, flipping a seat that had been held by a Democrat, just hours after Trump told reporters that mailin ballots were “subject to tremendous corruption. Tremendous corruption, cheating.”
“And so,” the president said, “I’m against it.”