Twitter’s decision to permanently shut down Trump‘s account has caused heated debate. The closure of Trump’s account is “problematic”, not according to Trump’s supporters, but according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Scholar Florence G’gell described the closure of Trump’s account, which has 88 million Twitter subscribers, as an “earthquake”. Two days after the intrusion of Trump supporters into Congress, Twitter unilaterally closed Trump’s account, citing the “danger of inciting a new violence”, setting off a debate on how to regulate the powerful online giant, according to an AFP analysis.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right of paramount importance, and interference with this fundamental right must be subject to a framework defined by lawmakers and not according to the decisions of corporate management,” Merkel’s spokeswoman Steffen Seibert explained at a news conference on Jan. 11. “That is why Merkel considers the permanent closure of the U.S. president’s account on the social network to be problematic.”
French Economy Minister Le Maire, for his part, believes that “the norms of cyberspace must not be determined by the cyber oligarchs themselves,” and he even believes that “the digital oligarchy is one of the threats hanging over the heads of all countries and democracies.”
Russian opposition leader Navalny tweeted that the social network’s shutdown of Trump’s account was a “censorship exercise” that was “based on political preferences and trade-offs. Kate Ruane, a lawyer for the Civil Liberties Union, a powerful U.S. civil rights group, argued, “We understand the desire to permanently block him now, but everyone should be concerned when companies like Facebook and Twitter exercise unfettered power to remove people from what has become an essential platform of speech for billions of people. “
The September 11th of social networks
European Commission Commissioner Breton, who in mid-December put forward two proposals aimed at ending the problem of spin-offs from online giants, compared Twitter’s decision to abolish Trump’s account to the “September 11 of social networks.
Since their inception, social networks have been sheltered by the 230 exemption, which prevents any prosecution for content published by third parties and exempts the social networks themselves from criminal and civil liability. Breton pointed out Monday that the dogma of Section 230, which has been the dogma of the strong rise of these online giants since 2000 …… but now collapsed, collapsed in the information space. The commissioner argued that for the first time in the history of social networks, their own decisions, are recognized by the main stakeholders as if they had the same responsibility as the media.
For his part, lawyer Christian Féral-Schuh argued that “this review is contained in the corporate article.” “In the United States, the First Amendment protects American citizens from any infringement of free speech, but the Supreme Court has likewise ruled that private corporations have the right to regulate the space for discussion as they see fit”.
For its part, the New York Times, in an article titled ‘Does Twitter’s Permanent Blocking of Trump’s Account Violate the First Amendment,’ cites scholars who have studied the First Amendment, noting that the companies’ decisions may be unwise, but they are perfectly legal. Because the First Amendment prohibits government censorship, it does not apply to decisions made by private companies. Of course, it is possible that such actions do not violate the First Amendment itself, but they do violate the values embodied in the First Amendment.
Chinese media personality Datong Li’s view
In his opinion, the president of a country, who holds the greatest power in the country and has the ability to change the living conditions of millions of people, should be under the “constant scrutiny and criticism of the public, which is the most important guarantee to maximize the interests of society. Shielding information about the president from the public is downright anti-professional and anti-social. It is also the responsibility of the media to expose and criticize the President’s falsehoods and actions, which is in no way incompatible with adequate coverage of the President, and is also a basic rule of the media: facts must be separated from opinions. The facts must be reported in a timely manner, while commentary on the facts is the right of the various media outlets to argue as much as they can.
He argues that “the United States is one of the rare countries where the government does not have a media, and the constitutional sages have placed their full trust in a free civil press and legislated to ensure it, a trust that also implies the highest social responsibility. A private, public information platform with a monopoly that shields the president from information would lead to a great imbalance and skewing of information in society, and would be a rogue act that deliberately tramples on professional rules and ethics, if not a crime.”
He added: “The result of private media taking, blocking and distorting information about a country’s president by their own good or bad will certainly give legitimacy and rationality to government-run media. In fact, it will only be the end of the road for these media when the public finally finds itself brainwashed by the information it has chosen.”
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