Will Donald Trump Be Banned From Twitter?
Donald Trump's questionable tweets have made school. They have inspired memes and slogans, and some are so ingeniously vacant they can even be called poetry: “The best taco bowls are the ones you eat at Trump Tower. I love Hispanics! ”, Wrote the outgoing president in a 2016 tweet, on the occasion of Cinco de mayo, a holiday celebrated by Americans of Mexican origin.
Other posts of him were more disturbing. Like the time he declared that his tweets about him could be considered warnings of a military response against Iran. Or the time he joined the insane speculation that the Clintons ordered the murder of banker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in his cell in 2019. Trump re-launched false theses on the birthplace of former President Barack on Twitter. Obama throughout his presidency and much earlier. In the summer of 2020, when anti-racist protests broke out across the country, he wrote: "When the looting begins, shooting begins." Trump's "worst tweet ever," according to a Washington Post columnist, was the one posted as he was leaving Walter Reed National Military Hospital, where he was treated for Covid-19, in October: "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your lives ”.
On November 12, he outdid himself with a series of unsubstantiated claims about the presidential election, won by Joe Biden. "I WON THESE ELECTIONS, AND A LOT!", He tweeted less than an hour after all the major news media had proclaimed the victory of his opponent. “WE WILL WIN!”, He tweeted four days later, undeterred.
In all this time, Twitter has never kicked Trump out. He hasn't even suspended him. Instead, the company has transformed its reluctance to take action against Trump into a new policy for "world leaders, candidates and public officials." Incitement to violence, hate speech and verbal aggression are all behaviors that would lead to the expulsion of normal Twitter users. But these behaviors were considered acceptable if they came from Trump and other politicians. "It would take something very deplorable to lead to his account being blocked, and I highly doubt Trump is that stupid," a Twitter employee anonymously told news tech site The Verge in 2017. rules that Trump must also respect: among the behaviors not allowed are the promotion of terrorism and the sharing of revenge porn).
This year, for the first time, Twitter has begun to intervene on the president's posted content. In the spring, when Trump leaked false information about covid-19, the company introduced messages to accompany his tweets and warn users (he also briefly suspended his son, Donald Trump junior, for sharing a video in which hydroxychloroquine is said to cure covid-19). Throughout the summer and autumn, the outgoing president's tweets on postal voting and electoral scams were accompanied by notes and external links to truthful information.
In less than two months, when he is no longer president, Trump will lose this protection and could theoretically receive the treatment reserved for anyone else. "The policy reserved for world leaders applies to incumbent politicians and candidates, not private citizens," confirmed a Twitter spokesperson. The company spent the entire last year verifying the president's claims, fueling the processes that lead to the birth of conspiracy theories, and labeling false information for what it is. But it has not yet used all its resources. And now the company is in a dead end: the expulsion of Trump would be interpreted as an aggressive political act by most politicians and right-wing voters. It could take him and his supporters to other, more isolated, online platforms, where collective lies and hallucinations could spread more undisturbed. But it would be hypocritical to allow him to spread false and dangerous information. And, most likely, it would damage the company's image. What will happen then?
Trump and his supporters could move to other social networks, where collective lies and hallucinations could spread undisturbed
To get an idea, you can look at the way the company has handled similar cases in the past. For the past few years, Twitter has been extremely reluctant and rather vague when it comes to expelling famous people. Especially when such a measure could have lent its side to the accusations of the right, which claims to be censored by the big tech companies. When Twitter had to consider whether to expel Alex Jones, a far-right radio host who re-launched a lot of fake news, CEO Jack Dorsey said the company had to apply the "same standards" that apply to other accounts to Jones, resisting the idea of "taking timely actions that would make us feel good in the short term, but that would add fuel to the flames of new conspiracy theories". Eventually the company ousted Jones for "abusive behavior", without giving further details.
I asked some Trump allies if they fear Trump will be expelled. Only Mike Cernovich, a far-right commentator, answered me. "Of course yes", he replied, adding that the company is looking forward to it. The experts I spoke to were much less sure. "I think it's a possibility," James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University, told me. "Twitter has always said that Trump was able to remain on his platform by virtue of the exceptions reserved for leaders and political figures". But then Grimmelmann added that the company could simply continue adding warnings to false claims, or begin removing individual tweets (the White House did not respond to requests for comment).
I was convinced that Trump would never be expelled from Twitter, especially since many of his posts were outrageous precisely because of him being president. You cannot be banned for calling someone a "stupid idiot" or a "fake" person. It is also rare for the company to take severe measures to punish racist, sexist or discriminatory comments, unless they contain explicit insults. Nor is it easy to get banned for indirectly asking to hit a person: if you followed this criterion, many pop stars would be out of Twitter for some time.
Much of Trump's daily behavior is inappropriate but not punishable, and his most offensive tweets are irritating because they call into question presidential power, with references to the nuclear arms race or suggesting that the military could have suppressed the protests by force. . This power will cease to exist on January 20, 2021. But Grimmelmann, like other experts I have spoken with, believes that Trump could have been punished for violating the rules on inciting violence.
Matter of time
Brian L. Ott, a professor of communications at Missouri state university and co-author of The Twitter presidency, agrees. "I don't think there is any doubt about it," he said. "He has repeatedly demonstrated the will to legitimize and fuel political violence." He will do it again, according to Ott, and will eventually be kicked out of his favorite social network. It is only a matter of time.
Even the staunchest defenders of free speech think calls for violence should cause Trump to turn away from Twitter. "It definitely challenged a lot of deep-rooted ideas about how to deal with the president's claims," said Katie Fallow, a lawyer with the Knight First Amendment Institute, who sued Trump in 2017 and won it for blocking some US citizens on Twitter. Fallow agrees that incitement to violence or a threatening phrase is the kind of violation where Twitter might feel entitled to expel Trump. It must be remembered that we are talking about a company, not a state body, so it is not obliged to respect the first amendment of the US constitution, which establishes freedom of expression. But the company could use the first amendment as a guide in a sensitive case, and claims that directly and immediately cause violence are an exception to free speech.
Twitter defined its regulations little by little because it was forced to do so. This year she has been more transparent than in the past about her decisions, because at a certain point she could no longer ignore the requests of those who asked her to take responsibility. But at the moment one can only speculate about its decision-making processes. For this article, I asked Twitter a series of questions that the company did not answer.
He did not tell me if there were any discussions about deactivating accounts - such as those of Trump's children, who are not elected officials - who have been spreading fake election news on Twitter for weeks, which were accompanied by warning messages. and they have fueled a conspiracy theory that has already taken on violent characteristics. He did not tell me if, should Trump immediately run for the presidential elections of 2024, he would enjoy the treatment reserved for politicians again.
The fact that he lost the presidential elections did not affect his popularity in the least
Twitter did not tell me whether Trump would be suspended or expelled if after January 20, 2021, he continued to spread false and destabilizing information about the elections. The company did not tell me who would have the power to make such a decision, nor how many details it would provide to explain the choice. As with so many decisions made by social networks that affect public debate and affect our democracy, we will simply have to wait and see what happens.
It can be said that none of this really matters, that Trump is too cumbersome a presence and too magnetic a personality to disappear, and that a former president can never really be prevented from having a space of his own. After being expelled in 2018, Alex Jones lost visibility, but he had far fewer followers than Trump has today. No person as famous or influential as Trump has ever been expelled. There is therefore no way to know for sure what the effects of such a decision would be.
However, we know what consequences the decision not to block Trump's account has had. If he is allowed to stay on the social network, his ability to influence the debate will not diminish when he leaves the White House. After becoming president, he garnered more than sixty million followers, and the fact that he lost the presidential elections hasn't affected his popularity in the least (he has gained about two million followers since election day).
He will surely use this huge audience to continue endangering people's lives with lies. A recent study found that Trump, along with twenty of his high-profile supporters, are behind twenty percent of electoral misinformation retweets. Another study found that Trump is the "main driver" of covid-19-related disinformation.
