What Was Donald Trump’s Twitter?
“I’m
going to be very restrained, if I use it at all,” Donald Trump told us in 2016.
Something else happened.
By John Herrman
- Jan. 12, 2021
Each of the big social platforms
handled the challenges of the Trump presidency in its own unique way,
scrambling to address or neutralize various urgent and contradictory concerns
from users, advertisers, lawmakers and occasionally the president himself.
But there was one idea that none of
them could resist trying, no matter how little it had done for the last
platform to use it: the informational label.
Since 2016, users across platforms have been informed that some
things they were seeing or sharing were disputed by outside fact checkers. On
Facebook, users were directed to Wikipedia
articles to provide information about the publications they were reading. On
YouTube, context from Wikipedia was added beneath some
videos that dealt with conspiracy theories and conspiracy-theory-adjacent
subjects. In contrast to the content they were meant to modify, these labels
were inert, uninteresting and frequently absurd.
No platform leaned as
heavily on warning labels as Twitter, which spent the year before the election
labeling the president’s tweets with evolving disclaimers.
In May: “Get the facts about mail-in
ballots.”
In June: “This Tweet violated the rules
about abusive behavior.”
In August: “This Tweet violated the
Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity.”
On Nov. 5: “Some or all of the content
shared in this tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or
other civic process.”
And Nov. 16: “Some or all of the
content shared in this tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an
election or other civic process.
And finally: “Official sources called
this election differently.”
Though some Twitter labels, which
it called “public
interest notices,” came with limits on the ways in which tweets could be shared
on the service, there is scant evidence that labels alone did much. Some
just led to backlash.
An informational
label alone — particularly one that doesn’t provide information that
couldn’t easily be found elsewhere — represents a particular set of
assumptions about what the problem is in the first place. It assumes that users
sharing disinformation are merely mistaken; that assertions of external authority
and expertise are persuasive; that a Wikipedia article is enough to transport
someone from a flat earth back to the round one they chose to leave behind; or
that a warning about forbidden information won’t be enticing, but discouraging.
(What kind of moon landing conspiracy theorist isn’t aware of the official
— and,
by the way, true —
story about American astronauts landing on the moon?)
The labels did, however, provide
insights into how those who run the platforms were thinking at the time.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, the platforms seemed to say, but the labels
resembled just a few more additional fluorescent tubes installed in the
ceiling.
In short, the tech platforms responded
to challenges of user moderation with performances of helplessness hiding
assertions of power. These firms wrote the rules for their users. They chose
when not to enforce them. The labels told us what was wrong and what wasn’t
going to be done about it. They may as well have said “good luck.” Then came
Jan. 6.
What Is
Real Life — and Is It Twitter?
Maybe you’ve heard the phrase “Twitter
isn’t real life” in reference to any
number of
situations where the consensus of some group of people on the service collided
with an external reality. (The Biden campaign, for example, embraced the mantra
before and after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the Democratic
primary.)
Much of the time this point is made
with an eye roll — get off the computer, get outside, talk to people who
aren’t tweeting all the time if you want to know what’s really happening. Of
course, it’s the sort of thing you hear most of all on Twitter itself, where it
once sounded wise but, over the years, has started to sound, sometimes, like
wishful thinking that borders on desperation, especially when it comes from
people — and I will only claim to be talking about myself here, other reporters
can speak for themselves — who owe so much to the service, professionally,
that talking about it without some sort of disclosure feels borderline
unethical. (Imagine the informational label: “This reporter reads Twitter in
bed on both sides of the day.”)
To be fair, Twitter changed fast. In
2015, it was novel, newsworthy, but mostly understood as a joke when Hillary Clinton and
Jeb Bush traded insults on Twitter. By 2017, President Trump
was attempting to make border policy with tweets.
Three years after
that, lawmakers, alongside hordes of regular users, were using the platform
to beg Twitter’s
chief executive to ban the president to keep American democracy intact, as the
president himself used it to claim an election he lost. There was no ignoring
Twitter without ignoring Mr. Trump, and there was definitely no ignoring Mr.
Trump.
Much of the planning for and lead-up to
the breach of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters unfolded in plain view on Twitter, where it was understood by different
groups of users, in utterly incompatible ways, to be both “real life” and all talk — this is among the reasons
the event took so many people by surprise, while others insisted that it had
been inevitable for years.
Twitter is certainly used for different
things. It’s an invaluable tool for activism, as its role leading up to and
through Black Lives Matter protests this summer made clear, again. It’s also a
place where people try to pump penny stocks. At its most effective, it’s a tool
for forcing
the issue (doing
so for brands is how it makes money).
As it relates to President Trump, the
American media was quicker to adopt Twitter than American politicians, but
American politicians understood intuitively what it was good for. It is
effective not for deliberation
or argument,
as plenty of prominent Twitter users seem frustrated to still believe, or for
building durable communities, but for making yourself seen, finding your people
and letting them find you, borrowing or building a following through
performance, and for manifesting all of the above into some sort of power that,
if not exactly external, was connected to the world outside Twitter.
In other words, Twitter is a pretty
appealing place to run a certain kind of political campaign. You can say
whatever you want, even if it’s not true. You can appear available and
accessible while also refusing to engage with anyone, for any reason. It’s a
place where you can perform false legitimacy well enough to reap many of its
benefits.
The Trump campaign’s dozens of election-related
lawsuits failed in court, as evidenced by hundreds of pages of bizarre and
humiliating transcripts, but they did just fine on Twitter, where they existed as
a collection of symbols of legal authority and action, as floating claims of
proof, and as an endless feed of promises and updates.
As useful as Twitter
is for campaigning — and this could be said of most contemporary social
media — it’s obviously not a great tool for the administration of government.
It has been useful for revolutionaries around the
world as a way to briefly assert power against governments; later, it was used
by governments to crack down on opposition.
President Trump always split the
difference. He simply never stopped campaigning, he never logged off, he posted
what he wanted, he meant what he posted, he tweeted like a revolutionary one
moment and like the voice of the state the next. He turned his Twitter back
against his own government, and nobody could stop him until his supporters started
battering down the doors of the Capitol.
Mr. Trump understood that, through it
all, Twitter was his to use as he pleased — as an insurgent platform, as a
bully pulpit, as a gladiatorial arena, as a gallows, as an executive desk and,
finally, as a bunker.
The
Most Special Tweeter Until He Wasn’t
The media that began the Trump
presidency wondering if he would stop tweeting after the inauguration (“I’m
going to be very restrained, if I use it at all, I’m going to be very
restrained,” he said as
president-elect in 2016) is ending that presidency with conversations about the
meaning of his ban from the platform, which was effected
late last week.
That conversation is accompanied by a near-industry-wide effort by tech
companies to sever ties with the president, his office and his campaign.
The central story is simple enough. Twitter was always able to ban Mr. Trump. He broke rules
that Twitter says it enforces for its users — rules that Twitter made in the
first place. Twitter had repeatedly admitted that this was bad but, like
Facebook, decided not
to ban him, citing the
public interest (over which it has assumed a guardian role).
Then, after the Capitol siege, Twitter
made a new case. The reasons the company offered for
the ban and the reasons that have been suggested by others for keeping him around can be summed up as
follows: He is the president. Likewise for the ban: Soon he will not be
president. Twitter allowed him to break rules and then one day it didn’t.
In its official
statement about the ban, Twitter alluded not just to its own rules, but to
the outside world, suggesting an imminent risk of further violence. (It specified
two of Mr. Trump’s tweets that “could inspire others to replicate violent acts”
as well as “the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6,
2021.”)
Twitter elaborated on this thinking in
an update in
which it said it had banned more than 70,000 other accounts (many clusters of
them, apparently, run by a single person) for “sharing harmful QAnon-associated
content at scale.”
The prospect of a ban of the Trump
account (also, of bans on harm-causing accounts) had been the subject of a very
public debate for years — especially on Twitter — but its arrival was still a
shock. The same people who had insisted for years that Big Tech was out to
persecute the president do not seem to have prepared for
the frequently raised inevitability that his account might get banned. Others
who have been pressing Twitter to enforce its own rules — including many
reporters — seemed to believe, deep down, that such a thing wasn’t plausible.
The way Twitter’s predicament has
exploded across the service has been one more demonstration of the service’s
ability to capture discussions — between politicians, members of the media,
activists, celebrities, pundits and the general public — and arrange their
participants into an almost-discourse, a blob of perpendicularly conducted
campaigns whose occasional overlap serves mostly to reproduce contempt.
If anything close to a consensus
position has emerged, however, it’s that Twitter’s ban of the president is
proof of the company’s unprecedented and unaccountable power. If this is
correct, it didn’t become so on Friday, neither for Twitter nor some of its
(much larger) tech peers, who simply exercised a power they’ve had for years.
The concept of
“precedent” is no more relevant on social platforms than the countless other
civic and legal terms they’ve borrowed
over the years — free
speech, free assembly, the town square, “courts”
with systems of “appeal” — in their own brazen performances of legitimacy.
Twitter’s ability to ban the president is incredible. So was its ability to
provide, for four years, a private, supra-executive branch of government for a
man who very much wanted one.
John Herrman covers tech and
media for Styles and the Magazine, and was one of the first three recipients of
The Times’s David Carr Fellowship. Previously, he was a reporter for the
Business section.
