Donald Trump’s absence from Twitter has had an even bigger impact on the American psyche than I might have imagined. It is often true of toxic relationships that you don’t realize just how dysfunctional they were until you can extricate yourself from the situation. I’m sleeping better. Food tastes better. Colors are more vibrant. But enough about me.
Trump’s absence has been conspicuous. Take, for example, Wednesday’s inaugural. It was calm and peaceful and refreshing. Now imagine the inaugural with Trump live-tweeting his running narration. It would have cast a pall on what turned out to be a pretty special day. We have one president at a time (“TOTAL LOSER Sleepy Joe got sworn-in twelve minutes early!?!”), but the outgoing president’s split-screen commentary could have easily been reality.
And that’s just one day. Imagine how good it will feel to string together a few months with no chaotic tweets. Twitter removed Trump from the platform to prevent him from using it to incite violence. But his absence has calmed things down to the point where it’s pretty obvious that this should have been done long ago, and for other valuable reasons.
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Trump might have posed a clear and present danger to democracy in the short term, but he also posed a long-term danger. His tweets—even the less overtly threatening ones—scared Republicans into compliance; threatened journalists; radicalized extremists; spread conspiracy theories, disinformation, and fake news; and eroded the social fabric of democracy. The calmness that has permeated these last couple of weeks has shown us that social media platforms have enormous power that can either strengthen democracy or help destroy it.
Now, I can predict the obvious pushback I’ll get from that statement. Only the government can violate your First Amendment rights, but Twitter has become essentially the national town square—the de facto marketplace of ideas. So deplatforming someone, it is argued, is tantamount to taking away their right to free speech.
Prior to Trump’s egregious behavior and rhetoric, I would have been very sympathetic to this free speech absolutist argument, particularly as it pertains to political speech. However, Twitter is a company, not a country. Good companies accept their social responsibility. And—to the extent that Twitter is also a community—shouldn’t there be community standards?
It is a paradox of a free society that its very freedoms can bring about its demise. This tendency has been exploited by the Soviet Union, radical Islamic terrorists, and, I would argue, Trump. The danger, of course, is that in beating back their exploitation, we may lose the precious thing that we were trying to protect to begin with: a free and virtuous civilization.
We are not alone in wrestling with these questions. Ireland recently passed a new hate speech law that includes provisions against online abuse. This sounds good in theory, but what constitutes hate speech? Would a conservative who opposes gay marriage (a position Barack Obama held not that long ago) qualify as exhibiting hate speech? Unlike other countries, America has the First Amendment. But again, it wouldn’t apply to rules imposed by private companies.
It’s also possible that deplatforming bad actors only forces them underground, making their thoughts (and plans) harder to detect. This is a risk I’m willing to take. I’m sure that prison allows evil people to network, lift weights, write books, and bone up on their craft. But a civilized society still benefits from protecting the mainstream—from keeping the bad guys off our streets.
One thing we can no longer do is pretend that the internet is some make-believe world that does not produce real-world actions. “Last week’s insurrection marked the culminating point of years of hate speech, incitement to violence, disinformation and destabilization strategies that were allowed to spread without restraint over well-known social networks,” writes Thierry Breton, European commissioner for the internal market. “The unrest in Washington is proof that a powerful yet unregulated digital space—reminiscent of the Wild West—has a profound impact on the very foundations of our modern democracies.”
I’m worried about preventing slippery slopes, but what I am not worried about is protecting Trump’s Twitter feed. This is a specific case of someone who has demonstrably forfeited his “right” to the platform. It’s literally unbelievable how different the world is with this one little change. There is little doubt that his absence from the platform will make it easier for America to heal its divisions, and for Republicans to rediscover their spines. We should have done this sooner. In his case, the power to tweet is the power to destroy.
