That’s fine. But you did conflate these in the first place, muddling our discussion.
A world leader is both a special case, and separately should be bannable for violations of the ToS just like any other account.
We can and should discuss these topics specifically and narrowly. For my part, I believe Trump and many Republican accounts should have been banned back in 2016 for hateful comments specifically.
The corp I work for cut funding to Hawley. Now a bunch of upper execs are outing themselves as fascists on work networks, screaming about unity and our company has placed itself as “judge/jury/executioner” and how AWS was wrong to ban Parler.
Yay…
Youtube is moving to remove him
This gets at the heart of the matter. When is “immediately”? I outlined the different time frames in an earlier post.
And to be clear, I don’t think Trump should never be banned, nor that he should never have been banned, nor do I think, on balance, that banning him now is a bad call.
I think Twitter and Facebook have grossly mismanaged Trump’s use of their social media platforms. And a lot of it is down to trying to write rules, or post-hoc apply rules they just came up with, to justify either them NOT banning him, or now that they’ve banned him, applying those rules and explaining why now they are making this decision.
The priorities of these companies isn’t clear. If they were clearer, it wouldn’t matter if Trump kept skirting the edges of the rules (like Hank Green mentions in his video). Fixed rules are very, very difficult to both judge and take action on, and it incentivises entities to find new ways to game the system without punishment.
I’m going to take a guess at Twitters priorities, in order, as I see them currently (it’s hard to project back into the past):
Now I disagree with the order of this list. But I see how Twitter arrives there. Not everything can be a top priority! There has to be an order to the priorities.
Twitter, as an American company run by Americans, is obviously going to put Free Speech above other considerations that, as a non-American, I find weird. But I also see Twitter trying to keep its central role in the entire world’s news cycle as more important to them than almost anything.
Thankfully, although it’s too late in many ways, it’s also good to see Twitter trying their best to respect the democratic process of elections, if only in their own country.
To have a conversation about banning a President from Twitter, you have to acknowledge the priorities of Twitter. And you have to acknowledge your own priorities, and also be able to put them in order.
I think you’re being disingenuous when you say that Angela Merkel is saying “we want Twitter to allow white supremacy speech” when the truth is closer to:
“The chancellor sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic,” Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin. Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature – not according to a corporate decision.”
In Germany, the top priority is human dignity. It’s right there in the first article of the constitution:
Article 1 [Human dignity]
(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority…
Free speech is down in article 5.
There is nothing contradictory in allowing for restrictions on free speech as applied by elected lawmakers, and also being uncomfortable when restrictions on the free speech of an elected leader of a country are applied on the whim of a for-profit corporation.
I don’t want to fully jump into this argument, but while I’m glad Twitter banned Trump, my problem with all of this is that a company, like Twitter, but not just limited to them, has so much power over the internet, the news, our privacy, the distribution of speech, etc., instead of the government.
I don’t want a company, whose goal it is to maximize shareholder value, to be determining whether national leaders should have a platform or not. The US is woefully behind the times on regulating the internet, digital speech speech, privacy concerns, etc.
As @lukeburrage pointed out, we don’t know what Twitter’s priorities are, although we can guess. But those priorities down align with the citizens and people of the United States or any other country.
Quite frankly, it should be governments determining policy over these things that have taken on such an important part of our lives, not companies or corporations.
Years ago, I read Code 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig, and it really stuck with me his argument that there are different kinds of regulations:
Regulations enacted by governments
Regulations enacted through corporate policy
Regulations enforced by social norms and mores
Regulations created by the architecture of the programs themselves
Our problem, at least in the US, is that our internet “regulations” have been mostly decided by corporate policy and capitalism. What we need is for more government enforced regulations to take the power out of the hands of Twitter, FaceBook, Google, etc., and return it to the people.
I am not hopeful that this will ever happen, or even if it does that Congress will pass good laws, but that’s what I think the solution should be.
Sorry if I went off-topic on this little mini-rant.
I agree we definitely don’t want the undemocratic corporate power doing the regulating, even if we agree with it on occasion. But do we want the government to be the ones regulating? If another Trump comes along with that power, then what?
Also in the US we have the problem of the first amendment making it so the government can’t legally regulate as much as a private corporation can. I don’t think a government run forum could ban the nazis even if they wanted to. But that also means a Trump can’t ban the progressives. A Twitter is free to ban the nazis. Then again, it’s also free to be nazi-only if it so chooses, oh no!
There are only two things that I am definitely sure of.
One is we should use anti-trust to smash big corporations. This seems to be happening, which is nice. With more smaller platforms to choose from, we won’t have large powerful undemocratic corporations regulating our society. We’ll also surely have safe places to go as at least some, if not many, of those smaller platforms will be good ones.
Two is that we have the the old principle that “yelling fire in a crowded theater” is not protected speech. I want to see this principle actually enforced, and perhaps it even needs its legal interpretation to be broadened. Anyone broadcasting any dangerous or harmful lies should face consequences. At minimum be silenced/deplatformed. Much like how we don’t allow dangerous drivers to continue to drive, people spreading dangerous conspiracies should not be allowed to continue to broadcast them on any platform.
Of course people will always be able to say whatever on encrypted, hidden, and/or anonymous channels that are very difficult to deal with. Thankfully the reality is that it takes a lot of expertise to communicate on those channels securely. Many who try to do so will fail and expose themselves. And the audience will remain small. However, if someone ever manages to build a platform that makes this easy to do at scale, and gets a large audience, that could spell trouble.
We also need extreme regulation on commercial speech, to the point that it should be carved out in a constitutional amendment.
Commercial speech is already unprotected, but the old Citizen’s United muddied those waters. We gotta get rid of that shit, and also go further. Re-ban prescription drug ads, and also ban alcohol ads.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but your problem is that you want a 100% perfect solution that deals with any and all situations. That’s not possible. Whatever the solution is, it is impossible for it to be perfect.
Instead of hoping for a perfect solution, we have to work with what we have. What we have are basically two options:
The internet is, for all intents and purposes, regulated by corporations that really only care about shareholder value OR government regulates the internet.
Given the choice between these two options, I’ll take government regulations every day of the week and twice on Tuesdays. Yes, another Trump could come along, but there are more safeguards in place in government than in a company. Those safeguards might not be perfect, and they might not even always work, but at least they’re there. Twitter has no safeguards. We are completely at the whim of their Board of Directors.
In terms of the First Amendment, when I was younger, I was pretty much a First Amendment absolutist. As I’ve gotten older though, and as the internet changed how speech is distributed, my views have changed.
Anyone interested in a more “updated” view of free speech in the US should read Emily Bazelon’s article in the New York Times Magazine:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html
I think this is a false dichotomy. There are clearly ways to combine both of these things, and also other solutions that are outside of the box.
Any solution that relies on the benevolence of corporations is doomed to failure. We all remember when Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil.” Look at them now.
Again, government regulation isn’t perfect, but it has the most safeguards in place and is ultimately controlled by voters, instead of shareholders.
You do know that it’s not this forum’s job to solve the problems of Twitter or the governance of the internet? It’s okay to have conversations about it, to come to a better understanding of what’s going on, without continually proposing solutions, and without skipping over anyone who joins the conversation who doesn’t themselves have a solution they need to defend.
There are other types of organizations besides governments and profit-motive corporations. DNS and IP address related things are currently regulated by ICANN/IANA which is sort of a non-profit consortium standards body. It’s also not perfect. It recently almost gave away the .org TLD to someone with profit motive. However, it was also responsive to action from NGOs who did not want this to happen, and so they didn’t go through with it. I don’t entirely trust this sort of group, but I trust it more than a for-profit corporation or a government gone wrong.
There are also other options like public benefit corporations and international organizations that are formed by treaties like NATO or the World Bank. A large international treaty that forms a new global Internet regulatory body I think is probably a good idea.
The danger of an NGO is that much of the world has very different sensibilities. If the US took into account what other nations consider to be hateful speech, we would be banning things like literal blasphemy/heresy.
This whole video but specifically the quote at the linked timestamp come to mind here.
The main issue here (as I see it) is that American democracy is, mostly, a broken system which can be captured by a minority party. In this case, it feels really dumb for anyone to propose that the government set rules for regulation or banning of speech (or religion or travel or assembly). You’re just setting yourself up for future problems.
In Germany (using an example I know better than most other countries) the democratic process is, mostly, not broken. Citizens have more trust in the decisions that politicians make, and so are more happy (than Americans) to give those politicians power over the exercise of their rights.
For example, it’s right in the German constitution that travel can be restricted “to help in the case of an epidemic”. It’s handy that the constitution was written after germ theory of disease, but it’s right there in the foundational document. While Germans are unhappy about travel restrictions, it’s right there on the walls of the German government buildings in Berlin: epidemic control is part of the deal.
If the American constitution (or amendments) reflected the actual needs of the 21st century, more people might be more willing to let the government have a say in more of these big issues. But free speech and other freedoms are always weighted more strongly, and there is no “except in the case of epidemics” release valve.
I’m building to a possible outcome of the Twitter debate, by the way, but won’t reach it in this post 
The house is the most democratic institution at the federal level, and even it is moderately disproportionately representative. The senate and the electoral college are at least elected, but are extremely disproportionate in their representation. And don’t even start with supreme court. Many people recognize these problems, and would like to fix them, but we’re doing what we can on that front. The rest of the world’s problems don’t just sit around and wait.
Our government is 250 years old and built upon slavery and genocide. We can’t magically transform it overnight to be as nice as more modern democracies that aren’t even 100 years old yet, no matter how much we would like to.
Simply pointing that out and then mentioning that the place you live doesn’t have those problems is not helpful or productive. This is why every time the topic comes up the discussion turns towards solutions. There’s largely agreement among good truth-believing people as to what the problems are. The thing there isn’t agreement on is what should or can be done about it.
Yeah, I said I was building to something. But I had to cook and eat dinner.
At the moment, most people seem to think there is one “internet”. But there have been more than one for a long time. See: the Great Firewall of China. China doesn’t have to worry about Twitter banning anyone, including their own President, for anything. Of course not. Twitter isn’t allowed in China. Problem solved! Solved for China.
Due to China’s economic power, they can make all kinds of media companies hew to their content rules, even outside of China. For instance, Apple telling its Apple TV creators to avoid portraying China in a poor light.
But in the coming years I see other internets popping up, all mostly disconnected from US-centric tech, and US leadership.
Today I noticed the headline “Russia may fine citizens who use SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service”. Is that about markets or is it about information control? Russia already has a Facebook clone in VK.com for Russian language internet users.
India has Jio Platforms, its own all-encompassing internet company, which isn’t just providing services, but is also the largest telecoms company in India. It skipped legacy cellphone tech and jumped right to LTE/4G service, rolled it out to the whole country, and now pretty much controls access for outside companies to the market of Indian internet users. Instead of its Facebook Free Basics route into the Indian market, Facebook invested 6 billion dollars in Jio, and this time that actually worked.
The European Union is, by passing more regulations, creating its own internet that, in time, might not be compatible with how the US tech companies want to do business. The reasons for these regulations are very different to those of India and Russia, but already many American internet publishers are simply not allowing European internet users to see their websites, because that’s easier than making sure they follow EU-written laws on data storage, cookies, etc.
Other countries that might have their own internet? Brazil, probably. Saudi Arabia for sure.
How this all applies to Twitter, and Twitter’s handling of Trump is based not on an American-led outcome. By holding up the First Amendment as an inviolable principle, there’s very little space the US government is allowing itself.
So the outcome might be led by the governments of other countries, or regions, saying to Twitter:
“Come up with some principles/rules/guidelines on how a democratically elected head of state will be kicked off Twitter.”
The sword held over Twitter is simply to ban it, or massively restrict it, in their home market.
As I said, this isn’t an issue in China, as Twitter is already banned. But what about the markets where it isn’t banned, but wants to keep doing business?
Can the governments of those other territories, with their own internets, provide enough pressure on Twitter to make them state their principles, and then stick to those principles?
And that’s why I bring up Germany, and the EU more generally. Europe is a huge market for many US companies. Germany is the leader of Europe at the moment, in many ways.
So out of all the other possible influences on Twitter’s policy towards the Twitter accounts of democratically elected heads of state, is Germany’s the worst? Absolutely not! It might not be the very best, but “best” can’t, in this case, be defined by “whatever is closest to the US approach, laws, culture”.
Nobody is happy with the situation at the moment. Not even Twitter! But the leadership of Twitter might benefit from looking at guidance from outside of the US, because none is going to come the the US government.
But some rules, principles, or guidelines based on the priorities of large markets outside of the US might be compatible with its business practices inside the US. And that might allow them to remain a central pillar of current events, news reporting, discourse and commentary, not just in the US but globally.
If Twitter doesn’t care about the non-US market? Keep going with the wishy washy rules with ad-hoc post-hoc rulings. That’s not working so great short term, and doesn’t provide a framework for action on future issues.
We’ve seen every approach to this problem, and I don’t think any of them have necessarily been right.
Some are choosing to only operate in territories where their product is legal. If GMail isn’t legal to use in your country, they don’t let you make a GMail account.
Some are treating users differently based on where they live. European users data is handled according to GDPR rules, but US users data gets treated as business as usual.
Some just operate according to the laws of their home country, and get fined/sued. They then fix their shit or stop doing business there.
There are how many different video game content warning systems now? ESRB, Pegi, etc. There’s the COPPA in the US. Every relevant service is handling all of these things in their own way.
Some countries don’t have copyright laws. Users in those countries search for perfectly legal pirated music, but it’s not on Google because Google is in the US and protects US interests.
Netflix gives you different shows to watch based on where your IP address is from. Apple gives you a different app/music/movie store based on what country you tell it you are in, even if you aren’t physically there. In Germany on Twitter all the nazi posts are blocked. In the US you can, sadly, see them no problem.
Handling all these different rules for different territories is expensive and time consuming. Large enough operations can handle it, smaller ones can’t. Everyone operating Internet services has to navigate the space in a way that aligns with their own goals and means.
There’s no right answer or solution short of ending the idea of countries, or something else ridiculous like granting the Internet its own sovereignty that doesn’t answer to any terrestrial government. As long as digital infrastructure still exists in the real world governed by countries, that’s not possible.
This is why I suggest some sort of treaty-based bodies to deal with it. We need to make it easier for people to make something that works globally even they have limited means with more standardization. It saves everyone time and money to not have to code a new set of rules for every different territory they operate in.
Very few of those issues have to do with how Twitter treats sitting heads of state.