Trump’s Phony War with Twitter Escalates
Donald
Trump’s attacks against Twitter, which culminated in an executive order about
free speech and alleged “censorship” on social media that he signed on
Thursday, have succeeded in at least one of their aims. As the death toll in
the U.S. from the coronavirus passed
a hundred thousand this week, many journalists, myself included, were writing
about something else. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, got it
right when she told MSNBC, on
Thursday, “People are dying, Rome is burning, and all people want to talk about
is what he said next about [Twitter]. That is a success for him.”
The dispute between the President and the
social-media network escalated early
on Friday, when Twitter tagged a Trump tweet which appeared to suggest that the
police in Minneapolis should shoot some of the people protesting the killing of George Floyd;
the company noted that the tweet “violated the Twitter rules against glorifying
violence.” The White House responded by repeating Trump’s words on its official
Twitter account, and Twitter tagged that tweet, too.
This escalation raises questions about how
far the two sides are willing to go. In signing the executive order on
Thursday, Trump threatened to remove some of the legal protections that
Internet companies were afforded in the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Earlier this week, when Twitter tagged a pair of
Trump tweets about mail-in ballots as being factually inaccurate, it was widely
seen as a narrow move: the company had previously announced that it would
police disinformation about voting and voting systems. But the company’s latest
action suggests that it may have decided to curtail Trump’s incendiary trolling
more broadly. In two tweets he posted early on Friday, after protesters in
Minneapolis torched a police precinct, Trump called the protesters “thugs” and
threatened to send the National Guard to Minneapolis, saying, “when the looting
starts, the shooting starts.” Explaining its decision to tag one of Trump’s
tweets, Twitter said, “We’ve taken action in the interest of preventing others
from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the Tweet on Twitter
because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given
its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance.”
White House officials reacted furiously.
“Twitter is full of shit,” Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff
for communications, said in a tweet.
But there can be no doubt that Trump and his flaks are delighted to talk about
anything other than the coronavirus pandemic. A few hours before he signed the
executive order about social media, Trump finally got around to acknowledging
the tragic death toll. Characteristically, he did it on Twitter, rather than in
person—a single tweet to
acknowledge all the lives lost, when, in the past three days, he has spoken out
loud and at length about a whole variety of other subjects, including, of
course, the dispute with Twitter.
Give Trump credit for one thing: with his approval rating in
the G.O.P.-leaning Rasmussen poll hitting its lowest level since 2017 this
week, he has displayed the survival instincts of a cornered rat. By whipping up
a fake controversy with Twitter, he has appealed to one of his supporters’ core
beliefs—that they are a persecuted minority. The reality is that, for
commercial reasons—divisiveness begets clicks which begets ad revenue—Twitter
and Facebook have given Trump enormous license to peddle lies and
disinformation, and to target individuals whom he perceives as his enemies,
including, most recently, the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom he has
essentially accused of murder. If
Twitter has, indeed, decided to change tack and make Trump conform to at least
some of the rules that apply to regular users of the platform, that is an
entirely positive development. But it was a decision that was sure to infuriate
the Troll-in-Chief.
In signing the executive order, Trump claimed that he
was moving to “defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced
in American history.” The idea of Trump as a defender of free speech is
nonsense, of course. Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that he
had violated the First Amendment by blocking some of his Twitter followers. He
has spent the past four years berating the media and calling for television
networks that cross him to lose their broadcasting licenses. What Trump really
desires is a slavish press and docile online platforms that distribute anything
and everything he throws out there without raising any flags. “He wants what
internet trolls and rebels have always wanted: to be allowed to post in peace,
free of limits and restrictions,” Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for the Times, pointed out. “Most of
all, he wants the mods”—moderators—“to know who is really in charge.”
The White House is threatening to rewrite
Section 230 of the 1996 legislation, which is the bit that exempts online
companies like Twitter and Facebook from the possibility of being sued for
libel or defamation due to material that appears on their platforms. Trump’s
executive order also directed the
Department of Commerce to ask the Federal Communications Commission to look
into changing the law, so that the federal government can remove an online
company’s legal protections if it unfairly censors or discriminates against
certain users.
The reality is that this is very unlikely
to happen—and Trump would be the first to complain if it did happen. To begin
with, the courts have taken an expansive view of the legal protections
contained in Section 230, and they will almost certainly object to Trump’s
efforts to restrict them. The Administration can ask Congress to rewrite the
legislation, which has long been controversial, but this would involve dealing
with the Democrats, who control the House. On Thursday, the Attorney General,
William Barr, appearing alongside Trump at the White House, said that the
Justice Department would indeed draft some legislation for Congress. Good luck
dealing with Speaker Pelosi.
The legal and political basis of the
executive order is flimsy, at best. But the real giveaway that this initiative
is baloney comes from the toxic contents of Trump’s own Twitter account. It is
the very provisions of Section 230 that allow him to post hateful and
defamatory tweets, such as the ones he has directed at Scarborough in recent
weeks. If the Administration, or Congress, were to go ahead and strip Twitter
of its legal immunities, the social-media platform would almost certainly have
to shut down Trump’s account, along with the accounts of his son Donald, Jr.,
and many other prominent Trump supporters. If the company didn’t purge these
accounts—or police them much more vigorously—it could be held liable for all
the incendiary and slanderous material that they generate and amplify.
Having his online megaphone taken away is
the last thing that Trump wants. In addition to providing a distraction from
the disastrous coronavirus statistics, his real intention here is to bully
Twitter into foregoing any actions that would seriously interfere with his
exploitation of the platform during the upcoming election campaign. An
occasional fact check here and there—he can live with that. But if Twitter were
to fact-check all of his posts, or to tag them systematically in the way that
it tagged his shoot-the-protesters tweet, it could significantly hamper his
ability to propagandize effectively.
In theory, Trump could switch his
messaging to Facebook, which has recently foresworn efforts to police Trump’s
posts or the posts of any other politician. The Trump campaign has already
pulled its online ads from Twitter and concentrated them
on Facebook. (On Thursday, the campaign put up an ad that
showed Joe Biden wearing a mask and standing in front of a Chinese flag.) But,
for Trump, leaving Twitter would mean abandoning more than eighty million
followers, a step that seems highly unlikely. Despite all of the hullabaloo of
the past few days, the Twitter Presidency is likely to continue.
