Commentary by Li Jun: In less than 24 hours after my op-ed “How Trump was blocked from social media” was published, Twitter announced that it had permanently frozen Trump’s account. In my article, I pointed out that “if Trump’s account is to be deleted or even frozen based on Section 230 of the Communications Regulation Act, it must be based on clear violations of the law, otherwise it is suspected of abusing the platform’s administrative authority. Twitter clearly identified Trump’s violations and promised to unfreeze him 12 hours after he voluntarily deleted the offending tweets.”
At the time the article was written, Twitter had clear management claims for Trump’s account and set clear freeze times and unfreeze criteria, a sign of clear management boundaries. But today Twitter’s permanent freeze completely breaks the normal management boundaries.
First of all, as the most important platform of social media, the influence of Twitter in the Internet field is self-evident. And Trump, as the current president of the United States, has the freedom of speech protected by the U.S. Constitution. This freedom is supposed to be two-way and confirmed by relevant cases.
In July 2019 a federal court in New York ruled that Trump violated the First Amendment’s free speech protections by blackballing other users on Twitter and must be corrected immediately. Seven Americans who were blackballed by Trump on Twitter sued Trump at the time, and the Justice Department sent lawyers to respond to the lawsuit. The argument centered on whether Trump’s Twitter account, which was opened before he was elected president, should be considered a private account.
The judge argued that although Trump’s account was previously privately owned, it is now de facto used for “is conducting government business” and therefore cannot simply be considered a private account. For these reasons, it was unconstitutional for Trump to black out American citizens on Twitter.
The decision in this case shows that Trump’s Twitter account is no longer purely personal, but is a mix of executive governance, statement of affairs, and multi-party communication and information gathering by top government officials. So, if Trump was ruled unconstitutional for pulling the plug on other users on Twitter, then Twitter’s permanent freezing of Trump’s account is also allegedly unconstitutional, especially if Trump is still in office.
If Twitter has the power to completely block Trump’s account, this would mean that Twitter has the ability to limit the ability of the U.S. president to manage through social media. This ability would theoretically require government authorization to have.
Secondly, Twitter’s standards for managing the content of Trump’s tweets are not clear enough, and it uses more restrictions than necessary. The permanent freezing of accounts is the highest level of restriction, and Twitter was very lax in its use of Trump.
Twitter should clearly draw the line when it comes to regulating and managing Trump’s inappropriate comments. The content that crosses the line should be dealt with or even forcibly deleted, while reasonable content should be allowed. Twitter has not done a good job in this regard.
Some of Trump’s tweets did involve encouraging supporters to participate in protests and even promoting “election fraud” that cannot be proven at this time. But Twitter should have screened and clarified them based on clear boundaries to avoid “catch-all” restrictions. There are multiple levels of restrictions from tweet content control to permanent account freezing that can be used progressively, but Twitter has chosen the highest level of restriction based on its own risk, the necessity of which is highly questionable.
On Weibo, the most commonly used social media platform in mainland China, we can observe a variety of different levels of content management tools. For example, post-facto control – forcibly blocking content once it crosses the line or causes a large number of complaints; pre-facto control – manually reviewing content after it has been submitted and confirming that it is normal before setting it to be visible to the public; for example, imposing mandatory tagging instructions on the content, etc. For repeated violations, accounts are gradually frozen temporarily and gradually upgraded or downgraded according to subsequent performance. These management tools can help social media platforms to build a buffer zone to maximize the protection of users’ freedom of expression – of course, on the basis of clear boundaries of violations.
Twitter, on the other hand, has directly applied the highest level of restrictions to Trump’s account, and even though it gave a partial buffer yesterday, it is not enough. What’s more, Twitter followed up by overriding the temporary freeze and even blocking all of Trump’s past tweets on top of the permanent freeze, which is not based on “controlling unknown risks” at all, but more like a complete blocking of Trump.
Finally, because it is for the purpose of completely blocking Trump, Twitter has a series of follow-up actions after freezing the original account.
After finding his account permanently frozen, Trump switched to @POTUS, the account provided to the current president by the U.S. government, and @Teamtrump, the account of his presidential campaign, but the content of these alternative accounts was blocked one after another.
In a statement to the press, a Twitter spokesperson wrote: “As we said, using another account to avoid the freeze violates our rules. For the latest tweets from the @POTUS account, we have taken steps to enforce this action. For government accounts such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, we will not permanently suspend these accounts, but will take steps to restrict their use.”
The above facts show that it is no longer the account @realDonaldTrump that Twitter has blocked, but the person behind the account, Trump. If multiple social media platforms join forces – which in fact happened yesterday – these Internet giants could work together to completely block Trump’s access to his voice on the Internet.
In real life, what business can gag someone into talking, even if that person is talking nonsense. On the Internet, these giants can, and they can achieve the goal of keeping a person’s voice from being heard based on their own ill-defined boundaries, inflexible penalties and de facto market monopoly status. Even if that person is the current president of the United States, he or she has no choice but to accept it.
The boundaries of free speech are defined by the laws of the land, not by the internal rules of the Internet platform. If an Internet platform believes that its users’ content has breached the boundaries of freedom of expression, it can take up the weapon of law and permanently block a user after obtaining legal authorization from judicial or administrative authorities. Otherwise, Internet platforms can only take relevant restrictive measures based on whether the content already published is in violation of the law, and cannot assume risk and target a specific individual for blocking based on past history. Without clarity on this point, Internet platforms are de facto given the power to adjudicate speech on their platforms – and to do so against a specific individual rather than a virtual account.
Twitter’s blanket permanent blocking of Trump demonstrates how the social media giant can operate as a “shoot-on-sight, no-trial” operation.
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