MANY of us here in the US can’t decide which is more momentous: President Trump being impeached for a second time, or President Trump being kicked off Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Truly, he was the first social media president. Now we have to decide what it means to have tech companies take his online podium away.
Like previous Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Donald Trump has always hated the mainstream media. Unlike his predecessors, though, he had an alternative platform to make himself heard. Trump’s tweets kicked up daily news doom spirals, and earned him the kind of hardcore fans that Beyoncé can only dream of.
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Social media gave Trump a broad platform, but perhaps more importantly it offered a set of narrower, more targeted ones too. Facebook’s targeted advertising system enabled , while aiming more palatable stuff at centrist voters. He could be one candidate for white supremacists who wanted to build a wall, and quite another for unemployed labourers who wanted the coal mines back open.
Put in the language of Silicon Valley, Trump was able to trumpet in real time, at scale, using mobile apps.
As we watched live feeds of insurrectionists storming our Capitol building on 6 January, it became clear that incitement to deadly violence isn’t just rhetoric or “free speech”. Under certain circumstances, it can lead to murder and sedition.
The most awful part is that Trump’s presidency was in some ways a boost for Silicon Valley. Twitter’s business model, if one can call it that, is to reel in new users with its roster of chatty celebrity accounts. What could be a bigger draw than the ultimate celebrity, the president himself? Meanwhile, for Facebook, Trump’s election win in 2016 cemented its status as a soapbox for the world’s political leaders, key to winning hearts and minds.
Social media algorithms, optimised for “engagement”, amplified Trump and his followers’ most extreme rhetoric, spotlighting conspiracy groups like QAnon and the far-right neo-fascist Proud Boys. Targeted content fomented divisiveness, ushering in the age of “alternate facts”. Once the pandemic was under way, it became especially obvious that fake news wasn’t just annoying, it could kill people. Speech wasn’t free; it was weaponised.
“Trump’s election win in 2016 cemented Facebook’s status as a soapbox for winning hearts and minds”
A few days before Trump’s mob stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC, a group of Alphabet employees – which include Google and YouTube workers – announced that they had formed a union. Among other motivations, the union wants to make it safe for employees to speak up about any unethical behaviour or discrimination. This is after AI engineer Timnit Gebru said she was fired from Google after co-authoring a paper about racial bias in the algorithms Google uses for some of its products. Google denies this allegation. Tech workers at other big companies are watching the Alphabet union closely, and could well follow its lead.
Facing internal pressure from workers, and external pressure from the general public, Silicon Valley’s social media giants finally banned Trump. Because they are privately owned companies, they didn’t need any reason to do it – they are exempt from the nation’s free speech provisions, as are all non-governmental entities in the US.
These companies could have closed Trump’s account at any time, for any reason. But they waited until after an armed insurrection at the Capitol to ban Trump for violating policies against inciting violence – despite years of similar rhetoric.
As we stand in the teetering tower of our democracy, it is clear that the time has come for Silicon Valley companies to acknowledge that they are key to our political process. They aren’t neutral platforms on which everyone’s words peacefully coexist. Social media is political media. The question is, how do we as a nation respond to what we have learned?
The public can demand that policy-makers regulate tech companies through an agency like the Federal Communications Commission, which controls political ads on TV, among other things. Workers can threaten strikes when companies design products that could heighten social divisions and disseminate lies. Hackers can engage in direct action. In the coming year, we are likely to see movement on all of those fronts.
In the 2020s, the social media industry will face its biggest challenge: to slow down and repair the things it has broken.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading Witchmark by C. L. Polk, an alternate first world war history in which a witch army doctor discovers a magical form of post-traumatic stress disorder – and a terrifying conspiracy.
What I’m watching The new French series Lupin, about a gloriously competent gentleman thief.
What I’m working on Researching how the civil war tore California apart.
- This column appears monthly. Up next week: James Wong
