One of my favorite video games of all time is Chrono Trigger, which originally came out on the Super Nintendo. It is one of the most popular and most respected JRPGs of that era, if not of all time, and the image above captures what I felt and still feel seeing the news of Big Tech companies moving to deplatform Donald Trump in all ways now that he is the outgoing President of the United States.
With nine days left to go, Trump is being booted off social media platforms left and right, and conservatives across all platforms are getting worried/angry. They could be next if Big Tech is really striving to silence prominent conservatives.
When you point out that this outright deplatforming extends only to Trump, you get told “But where does it stop?!” To which I have to point out that Trump in many ways over the last four years but particularly in the last two months has acted like a paranoid lunatic, and while he didn’t directly tell his followers to ransack Congress, he certainly encouraged their rage and even refused to deploy the National Guard or condemn it for more than 24 hours.
For the record, I truly believe the banning of Donald Trump, the current and outgoing President of the United States, was a bad move by social media companies. The corporate gang-up on Parler is not good, either.
That said, ordinary conservatives aren’t being silenced. People who are dicks are.
There are plenty of good conservative thinkers and writers who haven’t been suspended and won’t be. Occasionally, yes, there is a liberal gang up to report a conservative and they get suspended temporarily, but they usually come back with no issue.
It isn’t widespread. It’s just high-profile. Someone with a massive follower count or someone who is followed by a highly-followed account. Often, someone was being a bit too much of a dick in someone's replies and they get suspended. Given the high number of users and the fact that there are still so many conservatives on this site who don’t face the threat of suspension, those who do get “deplatformed” make up too negligible a number to really be a focal point of criticism.
What isn’t negligible is the number of Big Tech companies who are getting in on the curb-stomping of Trump’s social media. That is a problem and one that has to be addressed. It isn’t so much about allowing his rhetoric as it is showing people how easy it is to get rid of him.
Again, it’s numbers. It wasn’t some massive army of Trump supporters who were dumb enough to break into the Capitol building. It was in the hundreds. You didn’t see some widespread uprising across the United States from the 70 million who voted for him. It’s a negligible number.
What happened was dangerous, and he did nothing to dissuade them. But they were going to cause chaos no matter what. The blowback has been so immediate and harsh that Trump hasn’t done anything since. He isn’t a threat anymore.
To choose NOW to deplatform him serves no purpose other than to make those companies feel good about having let him stay on for so long when they really just don’t like him. That’s a bad precedent and incentivizes more of that behavior going forward.
That’s the issue here. They’ve shown how easy it is to silence a politician they don’t like. I don’t think there is a mass removal of conservatives from the public square, but I do believe that people who work at these companies are too quick to give in to emotional response.
And those people run around largely unchecked. These tech companies had better put a stop to that, or nothing will save them from government regulation that will ultimately hurt them.
That’s why I think about the image at the top of this post. You aren’t stopping Trump when you deplatform him like this. You aren’t stopping the unstable people out there from causing chaos. You aren’t actually stopping anything. If they want to, they’ll still do it. The future isn’t going to change because you suspended Trump’s ability to tweet.
What will change the future, however, is transparency in moderation, and actual consequences for moderators on social media platforms who make arbitrary decisions based on emotion. There is no rational analysis of Trump’s tweets that concludes he told followers to do what they did on Wednesday. It is purely emotional. Hatred of Trump and what he says and does makes you believe his tweets are a threat.
The only thing that makes Trump’s tweets a threat is bringing so much attention to them.