In permanently banning Trump, did Twitter show its swagger — or its soul?
Is it swagger, though, or is it soul?
The rise and fall of the most famous man on social media has certainly forced former tech start-ups to do what they have long avoided doing: punish the powerful. This has not been their instinct. For Silicon Valley’s most revered companies, years of rule-breaking tend to pass with no consequence until, suddenly, something snaps, and then CEOs move in near-unison to change how their platforms operate. As soon as Trump’s incitement to insurrection turned into a bona fide insurrection, he was gone from Twitter inside a week.
Yet the curious case of the norm-smashing Trump also pushed companies into a realm where most computer science majors and communications professionals are uncomfortable. This is the realm of philosophy.
First, there’s the political philosophy of free expression. These companies, obviously, aren’t governments, and when they decide to shut people up, the supposedly silenced can always go speak somewhere else. But the momentarily silenced do lose the guarantee they’ll be heard. How a private company should regulate public discourse is a knotty conundrum — and there are few matters of greater public concern than the fate of the 45th president of the United States. No wonder it took them so long to move.
There’s also the more philosophical side of philosophy, the side that concerns the nature of truth. We’re fighting over reality itself these days, and it’s difficult to say whether a bunch of white-collared, mostly white-skinned folks in a Bay Area conference room should expect the rest of the country to share their understanding of which reality is actually real. Twitter decided that was a risk worth taking.
Facebook, by comparison, has fobbed off the question of whether the ex-occupant of the Oval Office must be banned to what it calls its oversight board and what others call its supreme court. YouTube has simply stayed mum. These are tactics familiar to anyone who has worked in a big company: Do nothing, if possible. And leave yourself plenty of time to change your mind depending on what looks likely to yield the least criticism and the most money.
Twitter, however, is trying. The company has lashed itself to the mast of its decision. Why? The answer to that question isn’t in the “terms of service”; those rules didn’t seem to apply to Trump until they did. Nor is it in the blog post explaining why the firm yanked Trump’s megaphone. No, the answer was best stated in a 13-part tweet thread from meditative chief executive Jack Dorsey — which, given his reputation for the sort of iconoclasm that leads a guy to appear before Congress bearing a beard worthy of Rasputin, should perhaps be no surprise.
“I believe this was the right decision,” he said on the heels of the ban. He also called the precedent it set “dangerous.” Other words featured in the posts: “redemption” and “learning.”
These words, taken together, put us in new territory in the ban-or-no-ban battles of Internet platforms: the realm of morality. Social media companies need policies that they apply as broadly as possible. Otherwise, there’s no hope of creating spaces that are transparent and just. A cynic might say these policies exist only to obscure the profit-hungry heart of any big company. But maybe there is an actual heart in there.
Ideally, a spirit should undergird all rules — a set of values people and big companies can turn to when no road map has the directions. And when this unpredictable life brings along a personality or circumstance onto which it is impossible to apply preexisting rules, like the commander in chief of a democracy winking at the violent overthrow of government, it’s those values that platforms should look to, rather than a bunch of words on a page.
Twitter may be right and it may be wrong, but at least it is bringing right and wrong into the conversation. Which is to say there might be some sort of soul there after all — though the swagger can’t be ignored, either.
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