On Trump’s Twitter ban

Lisbeth Latham

On January 8, Twitter announced that Trump would be permanently banned from the platform, this was followed by an announcement by Amazon that it would no longer be hosting right-wing social media platform Parler on its servers, and that Apple and Google were removing Parler from their app stores. These announcements have greeted with predictable howls of outrage from the right about freedom of speech and prompted discussions to limit the ability of Twitter and other social media companies to ban users. However, the move was also met with concern and opposition by sections of the left concerned by these bans and the potential that the same policy could be used to silence the left. Whilst the right’s statements are inspired by demagoguery, both their statements and those by left opponents fundamentally misunderstand the question of free speech as an unfettered right that trumps all other concerns. Moreover, many left’s criticisms fundamentally misunderstand the problems of corporate control under capitalism and how we should challenge this power.

Trump’s banning from Facebook and Twitter was not just a response to his comments and tweets around the insurrectionary storming of the Capitol building on January 6. It followed years of Trump using Twitter as a platform for incitement and misinformation in violation of Twitter’s terms and conditions. Moreover, there has been an ongoing debate about the proliferation of racist and misogynist material and harassment on social media platforms and their failure to properly apply their own Terms and Service about appropriate behaviour.

The emergence of the internet, social media, and digital media have been seen as making a massive contribution to the democratisation of the dissemination of information, as they offer relatively cheap mechanisms to potentially reach millions of people. At the same time, the reality is that the democratic character and opportunity to equal access to these mediums is relatively illusionary. Whilst anyone can establish a Twitter account, the ability to use Twitter, or any other social media, as a mechanism for communicating with others is not equal and it is not unmediated. From their inception, social media companies have been attempting to develop ways in which to monetise their platforms. This has primarily been achieved by the introduction of algorithms which limit organic reach encourages users to explore spending money to increase reach or attract followers. The reality is that like other mediums, social media do not provide equal platforms across society – they disproportionately favour the powerful – who are able to exploit their power and wealth to generate substantially greater reach than the average person.

Freedom of speech is one of the great achievements of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions beginning in the seventeenth century – the idea that the state should not be able to punish or persecute individuals and groups for saying things that the state objected to. Having said this, it is also a concept which is now widely abused, with people increasing suggesting any critique of speech as being a violation of this “right” – seeing freedom of speech as a right to speak without consequence or responsibility, and right that more important than all other rights including the rights of others to their own freedom speech and autonomy.

The denial of a platform is not a violation of freedom of speech, as there is no right to any given platform – if there were then the reality would be that for the majority of the world’s population it would be a right that is violated on a daily basis. Moreover to argue that to deny the right of any publication or organization to be able to withdraw a platform, on the basis that it is a violation of free speech is to reject the concepts of editorial independence, moral responsibility, and autonomy of individuals in general. Moreover, it robs the powerless of important political weapons of demanding the withdrawal and denial of platforms.

It would mean that a publishing house could not withdraw a publishing contract because of an assessment that a particular author was an anathema to their values (or more accurately a risk to their profits) such as publishing company Simon & Schuster cancelling Milo Yiannopoulos’s publishing deal. It would mean that the other Simon & Schuster contracted authors who threatened to leave the publisher were really part of denying freedom of speech – even though they were threatening their own loss of a platform. It would mean a right to the far-right to appearances on TV and Radio, something that has been a central target of left and anti-fascist mobilising for decades.

More chillingly, this argument feeds into the campaign by conservative government’s globally to criminalise boycott and divestment campaigns aimed at promoting that companies and organize withdraw commercial and financial relationships with problematic corporate actors such as the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign targeting businesses operating illegally in the Palestinian Occupied Territories; the campaign to block financing and insurance for Bravos’ massive Carmichael coal mine project in Queensland, and numerous corporate campaigns for justice that have been key tactics of a range of movements for decades.

The reality is that companies and other organisations act in their own interests. This means that there can be a confluence of interests between capital and the far-right, even “liberal-capitalism” will see its interests more in line with the aggressive right than the left, particularly when push comes to shove.

As a consequence, the left is less likely to have the same level of access to platforms, and we will face the danger of being denied platforms. There are a range of responses that we have historically taken – the first is recognising that capital will protect their interests and seeking to build our own networks of platforms. Historically this has been clearest with the establishment of left papers, magazines, and publishing houses. While the advance of digital technology has opened up new opportunities for communication, the underlying cost of starting up some aspects of platforms have also increased. It is potentially outside the means of individuals, but most likely not outside that of collectives of the left, most notably unions. In the event where the ability for the left to be hosted on the internet were to be challenged, it would be possible to explore and establish this capacity, and ideally, we would be doing this prior to such a challenge. Beyond this, as with anything, we need to be making the case in defence of the right of the left and progressive voices to speak and be heard, placing pressure and mobilising resistance to any attempt to silence us. However, this can’t be based on an agnostic view of, or even worse a defence, of the right to promote hatred and violence opposing actions by private companies to limit this type of speech.

The development of corporate power poses a massive threat to democracy globally. However, this power cannot be challenged by the left throwing itself into a defence of the far-right’s right to platform on social media or the internet or any other communication medium, or backing right-wing governmental attempts to limit democratic space to contest their policies and their protection of anti-social corporations and organisations.

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