Today, Explained - Deplatforming Donald

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

First he lost his Facebook. Then he lost his Twitter. As of today, President Trump had been limited or booted by more than a dozen platforms. Casey Newton, editor of Platformer, explains the historic shift on social media. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for him. What a year this week has been. But the outgoing president is facing consequences. And I'm not talking about impeachment. I'm talking about something he cares about. They took away his Twitter. Remember back in 2016 when the guy behind at real Donald Trump became the president? What a time. That guy who used to tweet about whether Robert

Pattinson should dump Kristen Stewart while calling Obama a Kenyan is now going to run the country. And unlike Barack Obama, who I'm sure to the chagrin of Donald Trump has always had way more followers on Twitter, Trump very much attempted to run the country on the social media platform. Probably don't need to remind you, but for four head-spinning years, Trump has announced policy, threatened war, fired people, hired people, covfefe, moved markets, blasted the media, freed A$AP Rocky, and promoted his business interests, family, cronies, and lied and lied and lied from his telephone.

It's fair to say that if it weren't for Twitter, Donald Trump may never have even become the president of the United States. And now his presidency is ending, as is his Twitter. It really seems like January 6th was the final straw for companies that had been on the fence for a long time about what to do about an elected official, the most powerful person in the world, who was arguably using the platform to incite violence. Casey Newton, he's the editor of a newsletter called Platformer, perfect person to explain what's happening with the platforms. And while a number of platforms handled it differently, responded at different times, used slightly different justifications, at the end of the day, it was the fact that the president incited an attack on his own government

that finally gave them all the institutional confidence to say, we have to get this person off of our platforms. And who leads the charge? So after Trump went to the rally and encouraged his followers to march on the Capitol, he posted tweets, you know, including one in which he said, remember this day forever, which really felt like he was celebrating the attack. This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace.

So go home. We love you. You're very special. And after that, Twitter suspended Trump for 12 hours. Facebook then suspended Trump's account indefinitely, at least for the next two weeks. So that was sort of the initial thing that happened on Thursday. And as it suspended President Trump on Twitter, the platform also deleted, suspended, made invisible three of his tweets, I believe. Is that right? Yes, three that were directly related to the Capitol attack they removed.

And they told the president that he himself would have to go and remove those tweets if he wanted his account to be restored. And his account is eventually restored. Yes. The following day, somewhat strangely, I think, Twitter allowed the president to come back. But in his following two tweets, Twitter concluded that they contained a risk to incite further violence. And that became the true final straw for Twitter. And so on Friday, it banned him permanently. Mr. Trump lost his primary megaphone overnight when Twitter permanently shut down his personal account, breaking off his connection to nearly 90 million followers. Let's talk about the two tweets. What did they say?

So the final two tweets, on their face, they might seem relatively innocuous. The first one said that the patriots who voted for him will have a, quote, giant voice long into the future. And he said they will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form. And then he followed up by saying that he would not be going to the inauguration on January 20th. And Twitter posted essentially an analysis of these tweets and said that combined with what the president had said and their own intelligence about what right-wing extremists are currently planning, they thought that, among other things, the president saying that he was not going to be at the inauguration could have been interpreted

as a go-ahead for extremists to try to disrupt the inauguration because Trump himself would not be there and so would be safe. And so those were among the reasons that Twitter said that these tweets were the last straw. And what happens after Twitter bans President Trump on Friday? Then the great deplatforming began in earnest. Twitch disabled President Trump's account as well, while YouTube says it's accelerating its enforcement of voter fraud claims, pulling down videos from Trump. Listen, President Trump got banned

or restricted from almost every platform that most people use. But Pinterest? You ain't finna be on no Pinterest. You ain't gonna be pinning no boards. You ain't gonna be looking for no insurrection pie recipes. You ain't gonna make no white chocolate, white power pancakes. None of that. Reddit says it's taking action on reported violations of its content policies, which prohibit the incitement of violence. TikTok also banning videos of Trump's speeches

from yesterday, as well as hashtags such as storm the Capitol. For the last 72 hours, we've just seen platform after platform come forward and take some sort of action affecting the president. In some cases, his accounts are being removed. Communities associated with the president are being removed in an amazing wave. It's a historic moment, no doubt one that will be discussed for some time to come. Unsurprisingly, the second it happens on Friday, you have a lot of people from the right, the president's son saying Twitter permanently banned my father from its platform.

Think about that. If they can ban the president of the United States, who can't they ban? I mean, I know the Ayatollah is on there and he's said publicly he wants to eliminate the state of Israel. He'd nuke them if he could. That's not banned. Regimes that take homosexuals and throw them off of building rooftops, they are not banned. The president is banned, but the Chinese Communist Party, which puts Uyghurs in forced labor camps, is still allowed to tweet. It's inconsistent, right? Sure, because content moderation is never going to be consistent. That's why it drives people insane. There are exceptions. There are special cases. Ultimately, our democracy depends on a

stable government that has free and fair elections that are respected by the winners and the losers. And if the president is going to come in and mount an attack on his own government, I argue he has lost any legitimate claim to power. And if he planned to continue using his access to platforms, including Twitter, to foment further violence, he is effectively making Twitter complicit in all of that future violence. And most of Twitter's employees want no part of that. Now, you could say accurately that there are other places in the world

where violence is being fomented on Twitter and Twitter is complicit in that. And yes, that is true. But to use that as an excuse not to stop one of the most prominent cases of it from happening, I think is nonsense. Hmm. Okay, but what about all the other times Donald Trump has incited violence on Twitter?

Did Twitter address all the stuff they let slide for four years or so? There was the when the looting starts, the shooting starts post? Yeah. The president is referring to something that Miami's police chief said in 1968 when there were protests at an RNC convention. He said when the looting starts, the shooting starts. That was a threat back then, a statement about getting tough back in 1968, and it is a vile threat tonight. There was the liberate Michigan post from later in 2020. Yeah, that's right. Well, President Trump appears to be stoking unrest in states around the U.S. where conservative demonstrators are protesting against social distancing measures. The president is tweeting to supporters to liberate

places like Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia one day after he told the governors they were calling the shots on reopening the country. Which eventually led to a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. So yes, at any point along the way, Twitter could have come along and they could have banned President Trump. And that would have been their right as a private corporation. But I think that there would have been a lot of justifiable concern about what that meant. So no, Twitter did not do a blog post where they said, look, this guy's been on our list for a long time and we've just been waiting for an excuse to kick him off. They did not say that. Instead, they focused narrowly on what happened on January 6th. And I think that that was actually appropriate,

right? It's fascinating to me how many people want to skip over the fact that we had an attempted coup in this country and get really into the platform specifics. It is okay to say, this person incited a coup against the United States, and therefore we are removing him from the platform and not cite, you know, 40 pages of previous bad tweets to justify it. And the argument that Twitter and Facebook waited until the president lost re-election, until the Democrats had finally secured the majority in the Senate and, of course, the House. The argument that this was just finally politically expedient. At the end of the day, the man was the duly elected president of the United States. He had an entire media ecosystem around him.

And even if you wanted to ban him on principle, practically, I don't think it would have made that much of a difference. Because he would have moved to another platform. Some sort of bot would have scraped that platform and immediately reposted whatever he said directly to Twitter. And so this idea that we would have been able to escape Trump on Twitter while he was the president, I truly do believe is a fantasy.

And so I actually think that it was precisely because he was leaving power and losing power that made this decision more palatable because he could no longer fall back on the excuse that, well, I'm the leader of the free world and therefore I should maintain this direct line to my followers by inciting an attack on his own government. I think he gave up any legitimate claim to power. And all that being said, any way you slice it, Facebook and Twitter are now banning President Trump after benefiting from him for four years. Yes, it is also indisputable that these platforms have benefited from being a thriving hotbed of discussion about the president and his tweets. Of course, that has not been limited to Facebook and Twitter. Trump has been a pretty hot topic everywhere for these

past five plus years. But Twitter in particular, I think, really cemented itself as the heartbeat of the global news cycle precisely because Trump did use it to dictate everything from policy measures to cabinet members that he was firing, and the list goes on. So, you know, I saw today Twitter stock actually went down on the news that they had banned Trump, you know, the assumption being that people are going to use it less now. After the break, where all these people are going. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp.

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So they will probably go to what we're now sort of calling alt platforms, these kind of spinoffs that use a slightly different ideology around content moderation to try to attract more conservative voices. As Facebook and Twitter face criticism for how they moderated content during the 2020 election, many of President Trump's supporters are flocking to a different social media platform. Gab was the first one of these that we saw in a big way, but then more recently Parler came along. Parler, which promotes itself as a free speech space. And had some sort of deeper pockets behind it.

Backed financially by billionaire Robert Mercer's daughter, Rebecca Mercer, a major Republican donor who has given millions to conservative causes. And for the past few months has been making a concerted effort to court the conservative community and present itself as an alternative to what conservatives see as censorship on the big platforms. Big tech has shown the ability to shadow ban or to silence whatever you say, whatever you post. That's why I'm proud to join Parler. This platform gets what free speech is all about. And Parler was in the news a bunch over the past few days. So let's talk a bit more about this platform.

For everyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure, what exactly is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like? So imagine like a really buggy Twitter clone where mostly conservatives post. Like when you go to create an account, the suggested user list is Sean Hannity, it's

Dinesh D'Souza, it's the Epoch Times, all of these kind of conservative mainstays. And as you scroll through the feed, you'll just see the sort of most hyper-partisan, conservative posts that you can imagine. And what kind of bump does Parler get last week as the president is being deplatformed from Facebook and Twitter? It explodes. Every conservative media personality is telling their followers, go to Parler right now, create an account right now. I might not even be on Twitter tomorrow. I want everybody on Twitter to hashtag and open up their Parler account as quickly as they can. And also tell, people, I'm moving from Twitter to Parler.

I'm moving to Parler. I'm moving to Parler. So they create this sense of emergency around, you know, follow me on Parler right now or we may lose each other forever. And as a result, Parler sees hundreds of thousands of downloads. The site basically buckles under the weight of all the new users. It becomes, you It becomes incredibly buggy and doesn't even load for a lot of people. So Parler has a big moment over the weekend. But the boom is short-lived because Apple and Google almost immediately turn around

and ban Parler from their app stores. Yeah. So what happens is that many users of Parler use it to further inflame tensions, stoke hatred, and promote violence, right? There are now new attacks that are being threatened online against the government. They are happening on Parler, and Parler by and large has not been removing them. Now, traditionally, we've left it up to individual social networks to police themselves and decide when a post goes beyond the pale, right? Unless something is truly illegal, we leave it alone. But in this particularly high-profile case, where the government of the United States is under a credible threat, you've started to see platforms further up in the stack come in and say, no, we are not going to countenance this because we do not want to be handmaidens to terrorism. Amazon Web Services says it will suspend the social media app Parler from its server.

This after Apple and Google removed the relatively new platform from their stores. Amazon says Parler has violated its terms of service by continuing to allow violent content to be posted. And so at some point, you know, on Monday, it will be gone. I heard that it's already gone, Casey. Wow. Can you play Angel by Sarah McLachlan under the rest of this conversation? We've just done it. We've cracked that joke recently. Really? Can you play Good Riddance, Time of Your Life by Green Day under the rest of this conversation? We cracked that joke too. Man!

Can you play that See You Again song from the Fast and the Furious soundtrack under this conversation? We can. It's been a long day without you, my friend. And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again. Could the outgoing president just create his own social media platform? Yeah. It turns out the outgoing president has a lot of things he could do. He could live stream on one of his aide's phones. He could call a press conference.

He could appear on any nightly TV newscast. He could call into Fox and Friends. Nobody has more options to communicate with a huge number of people than the president of the United States. Right. And so that's why some of this discussion around the silencing of President Trump is absurd. And it's frankly bizarre that someone with as many options to communicate as he has is so fixated on this one particular hell site. Casey, you're yelling. Sorry. We've come a long way from where we began.

Oh, I'll tell you all about it when I see you again. When I see you again. So just for the time being, Donald Trump is nowhere to be seen on Twitter, nowhere to be seen on Facebook. Parler's gone. Where are all of his followers and, you know, himself going to go? To me, this is the really tough question that the platforms are facing. Because you can get rid of the president's account, but this big lie that is being told that the election was stolen, that's not going anywhere.

And I think it's probably going to be reinforced over and over again over the next weeks and months and years. And it's not just going to be average citizens that are saying this. It is our elected officials. We already have so many Republicans now that are repeating this big lie over and over again. And it is incredibly destructive, and it's tearing our country apart. And yet platforms do not have rules against lying, right? They've said over and over again, they do not want to weigh in on these sort of political disputes for good reasons, I think. But this is such a tricky thing because if this big

lie takes root in the United States, it is going to create division and I think promote violence like nothing that we have seen up to this point. So that is something that really scares me and I don't think that there's a great answer to how platforms should handle it. Yeah. I get that we might be living with this lie of a stolen election for a very long time, and the outgoing president will perpetuate that lie for a very long time, even once he leaves office. But in the interim, right now, while this assault on American democracy is still very much alive and active and scary, where are these people going to plan their next insurrection? I think most of these folks are going to try to see what they can get away with on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the places

where they've been most comfortable. If they get gradually kicked off of that platform, I do think another one will emerge. I think some enterprising entrepreneur will figure out a home. They will have to do content moderation. It will not be a place where people can just foment rage and murder. But if they do a maybe 30 to 40% better job than Parler did, then I think it can exist and will have an audience. You know, I wrote a few weeks back when Parler first had a surge of interest, is a Fox News of social networks inevitable? And I wrote that I believe that it is for exactly this reason. You know, in human society, we're not used to having one set of rules to govern every single person, right? We gather into tribes that have our own values and belief systems, and it just feels like something that is going to play out on social networks. And so this might be a bit of a cycle we're in where Apple, Google, Amazon are sort of having to police these platforms. Yes. And again, I think it's warranted because people are talking about overthrowing the government.

So if there was ever going to be a time where you were going to have an opinion, that would probably be the time. But hopefully, these conversations are going to downshift. They're going to become less fraught. There are still going to be danger in them, but platforms will not have that immediate justification of, in order to prevent imminent violence, we are going to act. And that's when it all gets murky and complicated, and I think creates an opening for a Fox News of social networks to emerge. hatred and insurrection in the public so that there's light on it on Twitter and Facebook or pushing it underground where no one sees it. And there's comparisons you could make here to illicit drug use or sex work, which is policed really heavily on places like Instagram and Twitter. Obviously, it doesn't put an end to sex work. Yeah. You know, unfortunately, having all of this discussion around the election out

in the light did not allow the truth to shine through. That's not to say that discussion should be driven underground or that it will be better off if it is. But I don't think you can just say, well, we have to leave this stuff in the open to prevent violence because the most important thing to remember about these platforms is that they have amplification mechanics in them, right? If it's you and I talking on the phone, no one is going to be radicalized by that. But if I post on Facebook and it gets shared a million times, all of a sudden I could have an outsized effect on the world around me. So that's why we ask these platforms to take an extra level of responsibility beyond what we would from other communications platforms. And how do you see the next few weeks

and months going where these platforms are going to be called out for policing speech, for deciding who gets to play and who doesn't. I'm sure we're going to hear a ton of grievance. We're going to have a lot of really important debates over whether platforms should have this kind of power, how they should be regulated. I'm not upset that the president is losing these platforms because he has so many. But if you're an average person, the fact that you can be essentially wiped off the internet and have no means of recourse if it happens to you, that should scare you, right? You can argue that being able to lead life online is a kind of necessary part of the human

experience for most of us right now. And maybe you do want some rules around who can be platformed and whether you should maybe have the right to appeal or have your case heard by a court of law, right? There's kind of a whole universe of questions around justice that come out of this that I think are really important, even though I don't think this particular case was that close of a call. Casey Newton is the editor of Platformer. It's a newsletter all about our social media platforms and their influence on our democracy. You can find it at platformer.news. Since we spoke with Casey this morning, Parler sued Amazon for antitrust violation, breach of contract, and unlawful business interference. It's asking a federal judge to order Amazon to reinstate the platform.

It's Today Explained. Oh, I'll tell you all about it when I see you again. did I explain? When I see you again When I see you again Yeah Yeah Oh Oh When I see you again