Big Tech fights with its monster
The 11thhour exodus from President Trump’s Cabinet and White House following the blitzkrieg he incited on the Capitol proceeds from the principle that inexplicably, unconscionably late is better than never. Here, on the other side of the country, the same principle animates another belated rush for the exits: that of the Big Tech companies without which the outrages at hand would not have been possible.
Led by Twitter and Facebook, the virtual pulpit and choir of Trump’s rise, a host of West Coast technology giants have moved to distance or exile the president and his supporters from their platforms, from Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch to Reddit’s message boards and Apple’s App Store. Most of the movement came only after the deadly attack on Congress that could bring about Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment with scarcely a week left in his term.
San Franciscobased Twitter led the pack in May by labeling and restricting viewing and sharing of presidential posts baselessly alleging election fraud and threatening violence against those protesting the police killing of George Floyd. Those measures accelerated in November as Trump vigorously denied losing the election. Last week, as he failed to categorically condemn the violence in a series of contemporaneous posts on his favorite platform, Twitter took down more offending content and then suspended his account for 12 hours.
Menlo Parkbased Facebook, notoriously slow to police what it publishes even in comparison to its reluctant social media peers, followed suit with a temporary suspension of Trump, but it uncharacteristically outdid Twitter on Thursday by announcing a longterm ban at least through the presidential transition. Twitter, which had briefly allowed Trump to resume posting, announced his permanent suspension the next day.
These foxhole conversions follow years of intimate association with the president and his movement. It’s difficult to imagine Trump’s rise or reign without Twitter, where he announced halfconceived national policy, spread misinformation and misspellings, and fired ranking officials. Facebook rivals Fox News as an echo chamber for rightwing propaganda and conspiracy theory, pushing its legion users toward ever more extreme, enraging content should they show any interest in the genre.
Trump’s debt to the companies dates to well before his presidency. The Russian government’s proxies used the networks to buoy his campaign, for example, creating thousands of reactionary Twitter bots and launching provocative Facebook groups that drew hundreds of thousands of followers.
Dangerous disinformation is not a bug of techenabled instant publication but a feature. In this context, the Bay Area tech barons are disavowing the monster they helped stitch together. No doubt they’re also hoping to preempt any overdue push to regulate them after Democrats take control of the White House and the Senate. The trouble with doing what’s right at the last minute is explaining what took so long.