Free as in Twitter
Twitter v. Trump actually isn’t all that complicated…
I obviously get why people are reacting as they are to the banishment of Trump from Twitter. It’s a big deal. He’s still the President of the United States. For now. And the issue strikes several nerves that are exposed in our current political environment — across a few different constituencies. Big Tech. Free Speech. The 2020 Election. Etc. But let’s not over-think this.
Take a deep breath and a step back. Twitter is a private enterprise. They can set their own rules for what they want or do not want on their service. Including whom they want or do not want on their service. Full stop.
You may not like that. But, to quote someone on the topic of Trump last year, “it is what it is.” And it is that way and has been that way for a long, long time. On the flip side, it’s rather amusing to watch some folks try to extrapolate what the Founding Fathers writing in the 18th century meant about social media in 2021. Toilets weren’t yet in widespread usage, let alone Twitter.
Yes, the fact that Twitter has allowed for some types of problematic content Trump was putting out there previously has made this decidedly more murky than it needs to be. The only thing people like less than change is contradiction. Which is to say, they should have probably kicked him off a long time ago. But again, that’s their choice to make. Not yours, not mine, and certainly not the government’s. At the same time, we’ve never had a week, a month, or a year like the ones we’ve just been living through. It sounds like there were and are credible threats of more violence to come which is being incited by Trump’s tweets. So Twitter made a call.¹ Again, their call to make.
This is not a free speech or First Amendment issue. To argue otherwise is disingenuous at best. Again, Twitter, the company, can do as they wish. Any other company can do the same — including, of course, those that would allow Trump to remain on their platforms.²
That’s all very simple and straightforward, where it seems to get more complicated is one level up the stack, as it were. But actually, it’s still pretty straightforward. If the App Stores want to remove an app like Parler, they can do so.³ Why? Because again, these are companies that can do what they want. They already do this on a daily basis by accepting some apps and rejecting others. They have since day one.⁴ One would hope they have clear rules around this for the sake of transparency and best business practices, but even if they don’t, they can do as they wish.
You can get why that’s frustrating to people who, say, want to use an app they can no longer download from said App Store. But it’s also not a legal issue. If you’d like it to be, then what you’re saying is that you would like Twitter or App Stores to be regulated. That’s a separate argument, but it’s moot right now because they’re not.
But even if they were, there’s at least another couple of levels still: CDNs and ISPs. Those are also (largely) free to decide what they serve up or don’t. Because again, they’re companies. And that will really piss some people off because it’s much harder to get around those types of restrictions. Unless there is a truly competitive market for such service (which there often isn’t), you could be out of luck. But again, that’s also not illegal. It’s perhaps a case why those should be regulated to some degree — hello, net neutrality — but this is tangential at best to the current upheaval.
Anyway, Twitter removing Trump is pretty far away from all that. But you can see the line that connects the dots which is why varying different parties are upset. It’s fine to be upset. But it’s also fine for Twitter to do what they did. James Madison would agree.
¹ And as morbid as it may be, part of the calculus must be: “do we want blood on our hands?” If Twitter leaves up content they believe is going to lead to violence, they would need to make the case to themselves (and just as importantly, their employees) that there’s a reason to do that when there is no legal rationale to do so. Seems like they could no longer make that case.
² Unless, of course, he were to do or say something illegal — which seems up for debate right now with the incitement.
³ And yes, one such App Store is run by the company which is an LP in the fund where I’m a partner. My views are my own, obviously.
⁴ With no less than Steve Jobs pointing to Safari, the iPhone’s web browser, as the work-around/bypass mechanism. I would expect that we talk a lot more about this in the coming months/years…
