Big Tech's actions are troubling
Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, deemed it “problematic” that Twitter had kicked President Trump off its platform forever. Problematic, indeed.
The move by Twitter, and by other large tech companies in recent days, should concern people of all political persuasions because they underscore these companies' enormous clout in being able to direct and control public discourse.
Yes, Twitter is a private company, and as such can set rules that, if broken in the company's eyes, can mean sanctions. Trump has a media team to help promote his message, and people can always go elsewhere or even create their own social media company if they want, the argument goes.
This is precisely what the founders of Parler did. Yet this site, which has become a popular alternative to Twitter for Trump supporters, saw Google and Apple remove Parler from their app stores over the weekend. Amazon followed by withdrawing the cloud service Parler uses to store data. The startup is reeling.
And, Parler had recently doubled the number of volunteers it uses to moderate content on the site and had offered other enforcement steps. The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial that Twitter and Facebook blocked legitimate reporting about Hunter Biden last fall, but, “Now an informal confederation of web gatekeepers is methodically destroying a competitor that was created to accommodate their views.”
Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Siebert, said Twitter was right to flag Trump's inaccurate tweets about the 2020 election, but that “the right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance.” Amen.
For a time during 2020, Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington had their eyes on Big Tech and sought to rein in these companies. Yet the suspensions of Trump's accounts have prompted little, if any, outcry from Democrats in D.C. That's telling.
Kudos to the ACLU, which said everyone should be concerned “when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”
These moves should renew efforts in Congress to look at protections for tech firms included in Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act. Trump unsuccessfully vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act in part because it didn't include revocation of that section.
Meantime, it's worth noting the reaction of Alexei Navalny, whose work advocating for democracy in Russia led to him being poisoned last year. Navalny isn't buying the argument that Twitter banned Trump for breaking its rules. “I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn't ban anyone,” he tweeted.
Twitter is a private company, Navalny said, but “we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state's best friends and enablers when it comes to censorship.”
Problematic? You bet.