Twitter’s troubles with Trump
In banning U. S. President Donald Trump, Twitter has done the right thing. But it has also made its own future much, much more complicated.
The decision to remove Trump will be debated in sweeping, philosophical terms. People will talk about ideological echo chambers and free speech. I’m not particularly swayed by either, especially the latter — it is astonishing how little people understand freedom of speech, which protects one from government censorship, but does not obligate any private company to broadcast a person’s views. ( Put another way, your right to movement and association doesn’t give you an unlimited right to just wander into my house to hang out.)
But for Twitter, the calculus was likely much simpler, and entirely inward looking: it needed to determine what was better for the company’s brand — leaving Trump on or kicking him off?
Twitter is a deeply flawed company, and we’re only just beginning to understand the role that it and the other social media giants play in our society. But this specific decision was fairly easy: political anger is obviously at dangerous levels in the U. S., Trump has a proven track record of inflaming situations instead of settling them and Twitter is his platform of choice.
After last Wednesday’s violence, which Trump undeniably helped foster by appearing at a rally shortly before the Capitol was stormed, Twitter faced a grim reality: Trump can’t be trusted to behave, the country is obviously at a boil and the company stood to be found guilty — by the public, if not courts — if Trump tweeted anything even slightly provocative and further violence ensued.
Trump’s been good to Twitter, on balance, given how he made the platform the centre of global attention, but enough was enough. The risk was too high and, with Trump only days away from the end of his term, the damage could be minimized.
So yes, removing Trump was the right call, for Twitter, and likely for the country, as well. But Twitter has now set a standard for taking action that it will be expected to live up to. And the company has a well- earned reputation for tolerating absolute garbage on its network.
In a statement released after it gave Trump the boot, Twitter explained that it reviewed some of the president’s final tweets and concluded that they were “likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.”
That’s obviously very specific to the context of last week’s events, but we can look at that and infer from it what a more general policy — the “Trump rule” — might look like. Twitter will decide for itself, but it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the Trump rule could end up looking something like this: highly visible accounts will be held to a higher standard than others when it comes to incitement, and if Twitter concludes that a user’s tweets may pose a reasonable danger of fostering violence, it will remove the user, regardless of whether the tweets would have met the standards used by the courts.
Again, mileage will vary, but that’s what the rule could look like. And the problem immediately becomes obvious. Twitter would suddenly find itself with numerous accounts that meet the threshold of fostering violence. Few of them would reach an audience as large as Trump’s, but that’s not really the point, is it?
Any world leader, or elected official, or media personality, or celebrity, or anyone tweeting from any corporate account or institution, would qualify. People who just turned out to be good at Twitter and had amassed large follow
ings would qualify. That’s going to be a lot of people.
Further, Twitter would immediately be responsible, all on its own, for deciding, with some consistency, whether any given tweet meets the standard of posing a reasonable danger of fostering violence, and whether the user’s reach is wide enough to warrant removal.
In a perfect world, of course, any user that used the platform to foster violence would be removed. But given the cesspool that is social media, that’s probably not realistic. ( More on that in a moment.) So limiting it to accounts that are likely to have broad reach would also be a judgment call.
Whatever standard the company sets for itself will be at least somewhat arbitrary, and it’s going to have to justify any decisions it makes against removing a user to that person’s most bitter enemies. This is a complete Kobayashi Maru, a no- win scenario — but it is the path the company chose for itself the moment it removed Trump. Every Republican who’s not removed after a controversial tweet will provoke outrage among Democrats, and vice versa. It’s going to be a permanent standoff between the geese and the ganders.
Even if something like my hypothetical Trump rule is enacted, there’s going to be a ton of pressure to make it ever broader and more stringent. The current standard of content moderation on Twitter, such as it is, is illustrative: Twitter is awash in horrific behaviour and conduct. A rule written to prevent outright insurrection and violent revolution will be pulled at and stretched until it’s unrecognizable.
Many of the tweets will indeed be outrageous, but a rule intended to stop the violent overthrow of an elected government will be looked to as a solution to very different problems. Twitter will either stick to its guns, and look like monsters when they declare something objectively awful as not quite awful enough, or find themselves committed to monitoring a barrage of content so enormous that effective supervision is simply not realistically manageable.
Some of the above is obviously speculative, but this part, at least, is simply objective fact: every call the company ever makes is now going to be judged against the Trump standard. “What, you kicked off a sitting president but you won’t kick off this guy harassing me?”
In the specific context of this moment, kicking Trump off the platform made sense. It was probably the only play Twitter could reasonably make given the very strange circumstances of right now. But it’s going to get much harder, and more complicated, going forward. Trump might have been the right place to start, but the company will get skewered, and deserve it, if that’s where it stops.
political anger is obviously at dangerous levels.