Twitter and Trump

Financial and political pressures challenge the social media landscape like never before

So last Wednesday I was about to write something on the changing of the guard in the United States, but went on a short hike first, around 11:30AM pacific time to be precise. As I came back an hour and half later my plans for writing this lay in ruins, and so did my schedule for the rest of the week. I am not keen on the 9/11 analogies, but in terms of non-stop news consumption, the last few days were close.

What’s taken up most of the online space this weekend it seems is Twitter banning Trump. Digging through the many counter (‘it’s the end of free speech in the US’) and pro (‘the president incited direct violence, a coup’) arguments it is not easy to come up with a comprehensive argument on what should have been done and where Twitter or any other public platform should go from here. The arguments against a lifetime ban are quite compelling, if a Russian dissident like Alexei Navalny warns how a Twitter-ban will get rave reviews by authoritarian regimes all over the world, one does take note. And, the incendiary tweets from Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei calling for the destruction of Israel remain up on Twitter as we speak. Threats by the way from a regime with a multi-year track record in actual bloodshed.

And that brings me to another point. Not all actions in the political arena by Twitter are problematic. I clearly recall the 2009 attempt at revolution in Iran where all the protestors relied heavily on the platform to communicate and spread news to the rest of the world. The US State Department, under Hillary Clinton at the time, asked Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance outage in order to support the demonstrators in the streets fighting for their lives and freedoms. Twitter complied and gave some much needed oxygen to a brave attempt to challenge a murderous dictatorship.

But Twitter is a balancing act of course. It is a publicly listed company and it has to grow and make money. And while the social media platform gets easily mentioned alongside Apple, Google and Amazon, it is a midget in comparison. Twitter has been a laggard whose stock price has struggled over the years and is worth only $40 billion today as compared to the trillions the others are worth. What this means is that it has to fight hard for its position and needs to drive traffic to its site and needs to keep growing its user base. In that regard, the outgoing president turned out to be a key asset for Twitter, driving traffic, debate, new users and thus revenues. The ‘outrage business’ if it had not existed yet was born under Trump. As much as the tweets from Trump were questionable, threatening and offensive, they were above all quite valuable. So a cynical view might be that Twitter did on Friday what many Republican politicians did this week, finally getting rid of someone that was way too invaluable to get rid of earlier. In others words: ‘thanks Donald, you have served our purpose, your residual value is minimal, goodbye’.

Twitter always has to balance a number of things: access to its platform for public figures, support free speech and make money will curbing incitement to hate, violence, insurrection and wars. A tough act, whichever way you look at it. What we need to see is that Twitter is essentially a public utility. In a way it has become the newsfeed or newspaper of the world and with it, much like any other utility, it needs to be regulated, not governed. It can still make money and do whatever it likes, but it has to maneuver within certain regulations that guarantee its existence as a public utility without abusing or misleading the public at large. And that is precisely what irks so many about the Trump ban: the lack of transparency of what it has brought about. Are a few Twitter executives qualified to make the determination to boot the president of the United States while letting the president of Iran go on about his genocidal rants? Is there something to be said for an independent committee to review these decisions against a set of pre-agreed standards, codified in a law rather than a privately composed set of user terms ?

The answer to me feels like a ‘yes’. Even with that the Trump case remains a difficult one. All his tweets are and should be a matter of public record. How can we now research his words if we are to write history now that they’re gone from the public space? How do we know what he is up to next ? Should Twitter not just attach warning labels rather than issue ‘bans’ ? I asked myself the question: had the platform existed at the time, would a Twitter ban on Hitler have prevented him from succeeding gaining power in Germany in 1933? It is hard to answer, but I somehow doubt it. When dealing with destructive political movements we need to contain them, but in order to do so we need to see them.