Donald Trump's incitement of an attack on the Capitol in Washington DC represented the tipping point for social media companies to do what it felt as though they had been equivocating over for a long time and banned the outgoing President of the United States from communicating on their platforms. That it has taken them so long to do so demonstrates the seriousness of the action taken: his missives have been marked and limited, but never fully banned until now.
Many will say that it was a long time coming and few outside the President's most ardent cadre would deny that he has used the platforms as a means of spreading misinformation in the most cynical, self-serving way. There are many reasons to deny Trump access to such platforms, especially after his (and Rudy Giuliani's) direct role in inciting a mob to storm the heart of American democracy. In the here and now, it is an understandable decision to take. In the bigger picture, it sets a potentially catastrophic precedent in allowing private companies free reign to decide which voices to permit or shut down based on nothing more than their subjective criteria.
There is an argument that the right to free speech means nothing more than the right to speak without governments shutting you down. This is true in a technocratic sense, but dangerously limited in recognising the fundamental importance of the free speech principle and why it has to be applied across free society in its entirety, not simply the relationship between citizens and their government and the law.
For better and worse, power is much more diffuse in Western civilisation at this point in time than any other. Government and the legal system may represent the fundamental structure on which society is built, but society's shape is no less influenced by private corporations, finance and, as we are increasingly seeing, social media mobs. That the fundamental principles of a free society should be assumed to apply to only one of these entities represents an ignorance, sometime willful, of how the modern world works and why the application of those principles must be core to how all forms of social and political interaction are evaluated for legitimacy.
One of the reasons free speech must be upheld so diligently is that if an empowered body is given the ability to unilaterally and subjectively silence one voice, even if that voice is widely agreed to be misguided, dishonest or to a degree destructive, they de facto also have the ability to silence all voices, thus enabling them to allow only expression which suits their ambitions. They can silence political opposition, uncomfortable scientific fact, the ability to speak out against corruption or the failings of a dominant ideology.
It is a modern misunderstanding that freedom should be measured by comfort, when instead it must be measured by discomfort: the more we are exposed to opinions and outcomes we as a society find challenging, and the more we are able to challenge others by pushing back, the more free we are. The paradox of freedom is that it must enable the tools of its own destruction. Liars and manipulators must be able to speak; perpetrators of heinous crimes may sometimes go free if the charges against them cannot be sufficiently proven. There are and must be limits on these principles, but these limits must be based on the criteria of objective, measurable harm - such as incitement to violence, which I'll get to regarding Trump and Giuliani - and not subjective interpretation.
It should be of profound concern that we are increasingly seeing private corporations limiting access to their services based on subjective criteria. These decisions can often seem fully justified, just as one might instinctively credit a government's suppression of speech widely considered offensive. A recent example would be Mastercard and Visa withdrawing the ability of their cards to be used on Pornhub after the site was found to be hosting large quantities of child pornography and revenge porn, among other abusive material. Few would argue that Pornhub should have been hosting this kind of often illegal material and that its removal was a positive outcome. Pornhub should have been compelled by legal order long ago to remove the videos. The problem is what it means that financial service providers were able to exert extralegal control over what material a site is or is not able to host.
The Pornhub situation is particularly concerning because financial services are integral to the functioning of any entity in society. If a person, political movement or company have no means of accessing or moving money, they will quickly die out. While being temporarily denied that ability forced Pornhub into doing something which should have been done long ago, one must ask what would happen were the likes of Visa and Mastercard to apply that pressure against a political party whose causes it disliked, or a person shamed on social media whom the companies could extract a PR benefit from punishing?
For those who celebrate the corporate embrace of the political activist messaging, consider what it would mean if every financial service provider individually decided not to process donations to Black Lives Matter, for instance, on the basis of the property destruction on some of their protests. Although especially important for providers of essential services like finance, allowing private companies the right to enact this kind of user discrimination is always fraught with risk. It is better to have uniformly apolitical corporations, even when faced with extremism, than allow them the unaccountable choice on who to serve and who not to.
With that we return to Trump. Despite its vast influence, Twitter is an important tool but for most people far from an essential one for operating in society in the way that finance is. Nevertheless, while it is not essential as a whole, there are parts of its functioning which have become essential, which is where I would argue the Trump ban falls foul, even if enacted for the right reasons. An informed citizenry must have easy access to knowledge of what its government is doing and saying. While the printed media continues to provide this to a great extent, there is also a growing percentage of the population which receives its news solely through social media.
For all Trump's self-serving dishonesty and his use of social platforms to spread discord and division, he remains an elected official and a head of state. To remove him from social media means removing a significant number of people's ability to directly access and verify the actions and words of those in power not only in their own country, but across the world. Thus, for all the damage was able to do through his use of social media, banning him represents a loss of transparency and accountability for the world's most powerful man and government. It is the discomfort accepted for the greater good by which the principles of freedom are measured.
Although Twitter said the ban was for him breaking their terms of service rather than for political reasons, this is not strictly true. The reason given for his ban was to mitigate the risk of future violence being incited: in other words, he was banned for a predicted offence rather than an existing violation on their platform (Trump's incitement occurred at a public rally, not on social media). Although it is perfectly correct for Twitter to ban users from its platform who overstep the accepted limits on free speech - inciting violence, harassment, defamation, et al - doing so based on an anticipated violation opens up exactly the same risks as allowing corporations to discriminate their services based on politics and other subjective criteria and preferences.
It is always possible for someone in power to interpret a message in a way to deem it offensive, or incendiary if it suits their purposes to ban that person. In the case of Donald Trump's ban, Twitter's intentions were likely taken out of a genuine desire to limit the risk of further insurrection following an appalling desecration of the functioning of American democracy by a mob of the President's supporters. As in the case of Mastercard and Visa's pressure on Pornhub, however, that the intention was commendable does not make the means any less dangerous.
To deploy that hoariest of clichés, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That power is more widely distributed among social and legal bodies is a bulwark against the totalitarianisms of the past, but also means the threats to our freedom come in smaller, more cumulative fashion, demanding a wider and more holistic form of vigilance than ever before. The danger of Donald Trump and his ilk come as much from him as in reaction to him.
