Social media dilemma after Donald Trump's accounts suspension
Several social media giants have taken a crucial step by suspending the account of US President Donald Trump, but must now weigh the consequences of this decision against their declared desire to promote freedom of expression. After the riots on Capitol Hill on January 6, when a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the US Congress, platforms cut off access to their services to the Republican billionaire. Twitter and Snapchat permanently suspended his account, Facebook blocked him from posting "until further notice," and Google's affiliate YouTube banned him from posting new videos for at least a week.
These sweeping measures undermine the idea of neutrality of social networks, simple supports allowing all points of view to be expressed equally. “Donald Trump’s ban was a crossing of the Rubicon for these companies and they cannot go back,” said Samuel Woolley, a research fellow at the University of Texas School of Journalism. “Until now, their main goal has been to promote freedom of expression, but recent events have shown that they can no longer do that. Twitter boss Jack Dorsey defended Mr. Trump's suspension last week while admitting it represented a "failure" and set a "dangerous precedent."
Immense power
Twitter, and other major networks, may indeed be forced to take similar action in other countries. "Businesses have responded to calls for violence by the President of the United States and that is a good thing," said Javier Pallero of the digital rights organization Access Now. "But they have failed in other places, like in Burma." In authoritarian regimes, platforms must assess the defense of human rights against respect for national laws. For Mr. Pallero, they "should stay and give a voice to pro-democracy activists ... However, if they are to identify dissidents or censor them, they should probably leave, but not without trying everything." "
Before the suspension of Donald Trump's Twitter account, which had more than 88 million subscribers, the tweeting network was quite lax in the face of publications by world leaders, deeming them of public interest even when they contained inflammatory comments. . Mr. Trump's sudden suspension reveals the immense power that a small number of networks have acquired in the circulation of information, notes Bret Schafer, researcher for the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
"One of the things that prompted them to act is the fact that the president's rhetoric has materialized into violence in the real world," Schafer said. But the specialist also underlines the inconsistencies in the implementation of these measures in the rest of the world, especially in authoritarian regimes. “There is a legitimate debate that the leaders of these countries can have an account while their citizens do not and cannot take part in the conversation,” says Schafer.
Regulation
The pressure to strengthen the regulation of large digital platforms is expected to increase further following the riots on Capitol Hill. But for Karen Kornbluh, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, any effort in this direction must be modest to prevent the government from regulating online speech. Ms. Kornbluh believes that platforms should have a transparent "code of conduct", limiting disinformation and incitement to violence, and should be held accountable for any breach. "I don't think we want to regulate the Internet," says the researcher. “We want to enforce offline protections for the rights of the individual. "
The platforms could also use some sort of circuit breaker to prevent the spread of inflammatory content, similar to those used on Wall Street in times of extreme volatility in the markets. For Daniel Kreiss, professor and researcher at the University of North Carolina, the major networks "are going to have to revise their regulations from top to bottom. "This situation really shows the power of these companies to make decisions about who will be affected in the public sphere," says Mr. Kreiss. It is not just about "freedom of expression, but also freedom of amplification." But since these are private companies, they have a fair amount of flexibility to set their own rules, ”i concludes.
