Should
Trump be banned from Twitter?
Kamala
Harris urged Twitter’s CEO to ban Trump. Is she right, or would it amount to an
assault on free speech?
Arwa
Mahdawi
Fri 4 Oct
2019 07.00 BSTLast modified on Fri 4 Oct 2019 16.41 BST
Senator
Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential hopeful, says Donald Trump has used
Twitter to issue ‘blatant threats that put people at risk and democracy in
danger’.
Senator Kamala Harris, a Democratic
presidential hopeful, says Donald Trump has used Twitter to issue ‘blatant
threats that put people at risk and democracy in danger’. Illustration:
Francisco Navas/Guardian Design
Should
Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world, be banned from Twitter?
Kamala
Harris thinks so. On Tuesday she sent a letter to Twitter’s chief executive arguing
that Trump has been violating the platform’s user agreement. Harris pointed to
recent tweets Trump had sent harassing the Ukraine whistleblower and the House
intelligence committee chairman, Adam Schiff, as well as Trump’s tweet
threatening civil war.
These,
Harris said, constitute “blatant threats that put people at risk and our
democracy in danger. No user, regardless of their job, wealth, or stature
should be exempt from abiding by Twitter’s user agreement, not even the
president of the United States,” Harris concluded.
Alex Thomas
✔
@AlexThomasDC
INBOX:
Kamala Harris pens formal letter to Jack Dorsey asking him to kick Trump off
Twitter, writing "these are blatant threats. We need a civil society, not
a civil war.
View image
on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
3,138
1:45 PM -
Oct 2, 2019
Twitter Ads
info and privacy
1,968
people are talking about this
Twitter has
acknowledged Harris’s letter and said it will be responding.
This is far
from the first time Trump has been accused of violating Twitter’s rules; nor is
it the first time there has been debate about whether the president should be
kicked off the platform. The argument has been raging ever since he got
elected. In January, Twitter addressed controversy about Trump’s tweeting –
without explicitly naming the president – in a blogpost titled World Leaders on
Twitter.
“Blocking a
world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide
important information people should be able to see and debate,” the blogpost
explained. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly
hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
Is banning
Trump an assault on free speech?
There’s
been a lot of outrage about the sanctity of the first amendment following
Harris’s call to ban Trump from Twitter. The Democratic presidential hopeful
Tulsi Gabbard, for example, said: “We can’t just cancel or shut down or silence
those who we disagree with or who hold different views or who say things even
that we strongly disagree with. These freedoms and principles enshrined in our
constitution are things we have to take very seriously.”
In response,
Harris’s national press secretary, Ian Sams, accused Gabbard of echoing Fox
News. “This was the exact talking point Fox News personalities were
promulgating on air all day yesterday,” Sams tweeted on Wednesday.
This may
not have been the most helpfully worded response by Sams, who sounds like he is
arguing that free speech is a rightwing talking point. However, it is true that
banning Trump from Twitter isn’t really a free speech issue. As Twitter itself
noted in its January blogpost, banning a world leader wouldn’t silence them. If
Trump was forced off Twitter he could just go on Fox News every day. He could
hold more press conferences. Hell, he could even start his own social network.
Twitter
allows Trump to communicate in a direct and unfiltered way with the public,
which may include spouting blatant untruths.
Further,
it’s not like Twitter allows unfettered free speech. As Harris points out in
her letter to Dorsey, Infowars’ Alex Jones was “permanently banned from the
platform in 2018 for spreading disinformation and inciting violence”.
Twitter has
also used algorithms to aggressively crack down on Isis propaganda. However,
earlier this year Vice reported that, according to one Twitter employee who
works in machine learning, it hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to
white supremacist content because “on a technical level, content from
Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing
white supremacist material”.
In short,
there isn’t a genuine free speech argument for not removing Trump from Twitter.
The company is a private platform with community guidelines that it has a long
history of enforcing according to its own discretion.
The most
compelling reason to ban Trump is that which Harris brings up in her letter to
Twitter: accountability. Banning Trump sends a message that Twitter is serious
about its rules and that Trump, like everyone else must be held accountable for
his actions. Not banning Trump, on the other hand, suggests that you can do
whatever you like if you’re powerful enough.
As
journalist Elizabeth Spiers tweeted: “I think we fail to hold people in power
accountable when we suggest that they should be immune from a platform’s TOS
solely because they’re powerful.”
Would
banning Trump be counterproductive?
Twitter
banning Trump would certainly send a message. The question is, which one? While
some might see it as a win for accountability, the right would immediately
interpret the move as censorship against conservatives and it would probably
boost support for the president among his base. It might even help Trump win
the election.
As well as
turning Trump into the victim he so desperately wants to be, banning Trump
would stop him from sharing his every fleeting thought. As Nate Silver noted,
Twitter means the president can “communicate in a direct and unfiltered way
with the public”. The spontaneous and unfiltered nature of Twitter may well end
up working against the president. There’s certainly a scenario where he hangs
himself with his own tweets, communicating things which will eventually help
him get impeached.
Ultimately,
I think, the most important point thing to take out of the Twitter/Trump debate
is that neither Twitter nor Trump are the real problem. It’s us, and our
addiction to every tiny piece of Trump content.
Rather than
banning Trump from Twitter, we should be focusing our attention on how we cover
him. After all, while 100% of journalists may be on Twitter, only a small
percentage of the world is. Trump’s tweets become really dangerous when they
are repeated and amplified by the mainstream news.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário