I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2019
This is so dumb in so many ways.
First of all, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to corporations or organizations, only to the government. Twitter is a corporation and can ban whoever the hell they care to ban. In fact, Twitter can ban President Trump or Bernie Sanders if they care to. They do not because it would be a foolish business move, not because they respect freedom of speech. Their goal is to have as many (real) users as possible, so if they ban anyone, the must believe there is a good reason for it. If you get banned and don’t like it, use a different form of communication or start your own social network. (That’s basically how Fox News was born. People thought that conservative voices were not adequately represented on the major networks.)
Second, social media is global, not American. If some Twitter user makes posts in violation of European hate speech laws, or libel laws, he’s going to get banned, even if he hasn’t broken any American laws. Different countries have different opinions about whether Twitter is responsible for the content posted by its users, so Twitter has to take a cautious position.
Third, Trump has no clue who on Twitter is an American, or a foreigner, or even a bot, so how exactly would he know if Americans are being systematically censored?
Of course Trump makes a mess of these things due to his ignorance, but his broader point is one that has a fair amount of support on all sides of the political spectrum: that Facebook, Youtube, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and, to really a much smaller degree, Twitter have too much power as gatekeepers, in large part, contrary to what Scoopy writes, because they are effective monopolies.
Facebook and the others are monopolies because their success is based on ‘network effects.’ People use them because other people use them. Although My Space was displaced, it’s hard to start up a competitor to Facebook because ‘everybody’ uses Facebook. A television network is a one way form of communication, so, it doesn’t rely on network effects.
So, Trump’s ignorance in this, and many people on all sides of the political spectrum have suggested this, is that Facebook and some of the others could be regulated as ‘public utilities.’ These are private companies that provide essential services and that also are effective monopolies. Of course, Facebook and the others would fight this and I heard a lecture where the person who spoke on this said it would take at least 10 years for this to succeed. However, this would give government agencies greater power to regulate Facebook and the others, and these agencies could exercise some say over who can and can’t be banned.
I’m not arguing this is a good idea, but this is what a President could initiate if they thought that Facebook and the others had too much effective power as free speech gatekeepers.
I’m not sure that I explained the concept of ‘network effects’ well enough. Using common terms, there are two different ways ‘network effects’ can work:
1.The whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Each Beatles musician was pretty good, but combined they were extraordinary.
2.A critical mass. A few years ago Facebook had enough users that it was probable your former high school friends or other people you might want to get in touch with again were using it. So, more people joined up. That meant it was even more probable to remaining non users that people you might want to get in touch with were using it. This critical mass leads to a ‘virtuous circle’ where further growth encourages even further growth.
Then, some services start using Facebook which starts to make it essential for everybody, so that it can’t simply be given up.
Youtube has a similar thing in that since they allow people to post their own videos on it, if people want their videos to be seen, they know the best place is Youtube. Nobody is going to start using Itube when Youtube already exists.
Twitter actually has a fairly small regularly user base (though it’s now profitable) but it does allow people to directly contact important people and institutions.
I’ve never used Instagram.
So, given this, I think it would be extremely difficult for a ‘conservative’ Facebook to reach a ‘critical mass’ of users. That ‘conservative’ extremists and loons use Facebook and that encourages like minded people to join or stay on Facebook is obviously one reason why Facebook is very reluctant to ban them.
Conservatives can elect a president, and make a broadcast TV network profitable, but can’t compete with Twitter? Well, if you say so.
I think a bigger problem is conservatives who want their message to be heard by the general public, and then can’t stand it when a lot of the general public ridicules their message, or finds the hateful, racist or sexist parts of it hateful, racist or sexist.
They tend to explode with rage after that, I have noticed in other places (I am not signed up to Twitter) and that tends to get them banned. Who’d a thunk it?
Adam, you’re missing the point that the internet is not American. If the US government decided to regulate what Twitter can and can’t do, they’d simply pull up their operations and operate in a friendlier environment, just as Howard Stern pulled up operations and started broadcasting from space, away from the reach of the FCC.
The USA doesn’t want to do that because there are jobs lost if Twitter decides to move its HQ to Costa Rica or Switzerland or The Bahamas.
Furthermore, their monopoly is meaningless if they manage to offend, let’s say, the mainstream of American conservatism rather than just the fringe wackos. If that happened, it would take about a day to start Conservative Twitter, and about a week to make it a massive enterprise. There is no massive and costly barrier to entry as there would be with, let’s say, competing with Amazon or Time-Warner. Start-up costs are minimal, technical requirements are minimal, and the business would grow quickly for the very reasons you state – conservatives would join because other conservatives are on it. They could even use Twitter and Facebook to promote it!
That is precisely why Twitter wants to stay on a safe middle ground. They know full well how vulnerable their virtual monopoly is, unlike (for example) Amazon’s. You and I can’t duplicate Amazon’s infrastructure without billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees, but the two of us can buy a domain name and duplicate Twitter tomorrow if we know there will be a market for it. That’s the ultimate safeguard against Twitter power. They want to do everything possible to hold on to that mass audience, creating no reason for a gigantic bloc of customers to spin off and compete with them.
1.Not sure about the point of Facebook or Twitter relocating. The United States can regulate these entities as public utilities whether their head offices are located in the United States or not. I’m sure you have a valid practical issue of how these regulations would work given that the internet is world wide, however that has nothing to do with where the head office of Facebook and Twitter is located.
2.I’m not sure a ‘conservative’ Facebook would be that easy to start up. Certainly, all attempts to start a rival to Facebook have failed, and this has included ‘conservative’ equivalents of Facebook.
They have failed because Facebook has followed a path that is safely mainstream. If Facebook alienated a large bloc of people, an alternative would form. That is exactly why Facebook (and Twitter) will remain safely mainstream and not, for example, alienate the conservative movement in general.
This is a case where the USA is the only government in the world which can’t really control Twitter’s content, thanks to the First Amendment. In fact, right now the United States is merely the tail of the dog on social media because of European laws. Let’s say somebody like Alex Jones does something to violate the EU’s hate speech laws. After it has been reported to Twitter, they have only 24 hours to remove the content completely or face massive fines in the EU. So if the EU’s laws determine that, exactly what control can the US government have over that in practical terms? None that I can see. If the EU determines that something is hate speech, Twitter pretty much has to remove it, no matter what American conservatives say. And Twitter can’t solve the problem by just blocking it for Europe, because Europe would still fine them, because their laws take VPNs and torrents into account, so anything online is considered in Europe.
There are highly successful social media platforms outside the USA now, and our government has not the slightest influence over them. Many right-wing lunatics already use vkontakte (500 million accounts – more than Twitter) to communicate, and heaven only know how big QQ is – they sometimes have more simultaneous users than Twitter has total accounts. So if the USA declared vkontakte a public utility, exactly what control would that give the American government in practical terms? None that I can see.
The US government hasn’t really figured out yet that the internet is much bigger than the United States.
In the future? I don’t think Twitter and Facebook will have much of a role in the future. The market will fragment, just as it has in television. There was a time when CBS News and the Tonight Show (Johnny Carson) on NBC shaped our POV. Now they are just a tiny bit of a massive fragmented market. I think that will happen on the internet sooner or later, probably sooner. It’s already happening to Facebook, which is already being relegated in the United States to the status of an “old people thing.” Facebook has lost more than 20% of its American users in the 12-34 demographic in just two years.
I was not aware of that with Europe. In regards to the First Amendment ‘it depends what the definition of is, is.’ As you know from the FCC, there are abilities of even the U.S Federal government to regulate ‘speech’ because the definition of ‘speech’ at the time of the writing of the Constitution did not mean everything said or expressed under the sun.
As I’m sure you know there have been several Supreme Court decisions defining speech or expression (in regards to pornography, “I know it when I see it”) and it essentially means ‘speech with merit’ with “merit” having been increasingly broadly defined by Supreme Court decisions.
The practical limits of the First Amendment are well documented, but they clearly do not include “hate speech,” which is fully protected in America, and probably in no other country. But again, Twitter is global. If people are posting racist screeds, they will get banned from Twitter because of (for example) European laws, even though the First Amendment allows that kind of public discourse in America. That is not an indication of pro-liberal bias.
But law or no laws, why do conservatives even want to defend the people they are defending? This entire issue is surreal. Facebook bans Alex Jones and conservatives consider that to be censorship of their voice. Really? Decent people who consider themselves conservatives want to be associated with Alex Jones? Could that be any sadder? He is not just an extreme voice representing one side of the issues, ala Noam Chomsky. He’s a dangerous and reckless lunatic.
On the other hand, I am confused about Twitter’s temporary lock of James Woods’ account. His “offensive” Tweet doesn’t really seem to violate their ToS. That one does kinda seem like liberal bias.
You may not be aware but many conservative voices have been banned from Twitter, or you may think that’s ok.
There have been extremists and loony conspiracy theorists who have been banned from Twitter. If they happen to be predominantly ‘conservative’ you might want to re-think some aspects of ‘conservative’ philosophy rather than blame twitter.
EXACTLY…
Care to name one, steve, and show us sample of their conservative thinking? Because if you mean Alex Jones, you can hear me laughing already. He is NOT a “conservative” voice, BTW – he is a cross between a nut case, a demagogue, and a con man.
I absolutely think that’s OK. I think Twitter has the right to ban all conservatives if they want to. Or all liberals if they want to. They are in business, and should be free to choose their own business model.
As a non-governmental entity, they are not bound by the First Amendment.
As a global entity, they must find the proper balance between the laws and ethics of all nations and cultures, not just America’s
The reason they don’t do things like that is … that they are in business, and want as many customers as possible. It would be perfectly OK, but it would be stupid. They want liberal dollars and conservative dollars. They want rubles and yen and euros as well. As a result they only ban those accounts that advocate or generate criminal activity, or that violate the generally agreed human standards of decency.
Banning Alex Jones is obvious. His loony conspiracy theories cause innocent people to be harassed and threatened. Worse yet, the objects of the harassment are frequently victims of tragedies – like parents that have lost their children in school shootings. This goes against any human measure of decency. He isn’t “conservative.” He’s “deranged.”
But if Twitter thinks it could increase profits by banning the Democratic Party, or the President, or all accounts from Russia, well, it’s their decision to make.
Well., Trump probably assumes that all white supremacists and anti-semites are American… so…