Left-wing media is up in arms, demanding to know why the President of the United States has not been banned from Twitter.
Op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Canada’s second-largest newspaper, the Globe and Mail, have all published op-eds and analyses over the past 24 hours, all tackling the same question of President Trump’s continued presence on the social media platform.
While they have raised the topic before, the latest round of whinging has been prompted by the President’s recent mockery of North Korean leader Kim Jong-nn over the effectiveness of his nuclear arsenal.
An analysis column for the Washington Post suggests that bruising the North Korean leader’s ego might be classified as “hateful conduct”:
Whenever the President of the United States tweets something like this, a question that has been asked since at least the beginning of Trump’s rise to power begins to circulate again: Why has Twitter not taken action against Trump’s tweets — or banned his account for violating its policies on hateful content and/or violent threats? In September, you might remember, Twitter defended its decision to keep Trump’s account intact when the president tweeted something else that was interpreted as a threat to North Korea.
The New York Times also connected Twitter’s policies on “hateful” content to the president’s tweet:
The remark led to an immediate debate over whether Mr. Trump had broken Twitter’s rules and whether the platform should bar him from posting.
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Twitter has made several changes to its guidelines in recent months involving sexual content and abusive language, though many users have called for more.
In December, the company began enforcing new rules on violence. “Specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people is in violation of our policies,” it said in a blog post. It also banned hateful imagery and symbols in profile images and headers.
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s second-largest newspaper by circulation, published a strongly-worded opinion column calling for Twitter to ban Trump, even suggesting that the platform might be held responsible for nuclear war:
Of course, we don’t know if Mr. Trump will succeed in taking us over a cliff after mocking someone as unstable as Kim Jong once too often, unleashing a firestorm of pain and unimaginable loss in the process. If it does happen, however, there will be blood on the hands of many people, and many institutions that stood by silently while the President laid the groundwork for chaos and destruction.
Among those who will have plenty to answer for are the powers that be at Twitter, which has allowed Mr. Trump to use the social media platform as his own bully pulpit from which he has harassed, threatened and used fear to silence voices of opposition in violation of the company’s own code of conduct rules.
Left-leaning magazine Slate was an outlier, pointing out that Trump’s tweet didn’t actually violate Twitter’s policies, and that “threats of violence” are an integral part of international diplomacy:
First of all, Trump’s nuclear-button tweet didn’t actually violate Twitter’s policies. Those rules prohibit “specific threats of violence,” which the company defines as “explicit statements of one’s intent to kill or inflict serious physical harm against another person.” Trump’s tweet carried an implied threat of military action— not an explicit statement of intent.
Implied threats of military action, by the way, are a foundation of international relations: It’s called deterrence, and in defter hands than Trump’s it can be an effective peacekeeping strategy. There are good arguments for Twitter to police hate speech, personal harassment, pornography, and other forms of abuse. But the ability to conduct politics, activism, punditry, and even diplomacy via Twitter has long been a core feature of the service. It was never meant to be a conflict-free zone. Which is why Twitter recently clarified that its rules on threats of violence do not apply to military or government entities.
The Atlantic published the wokest take so far, arguing that not just Trump, but every world leader should be banned from Twitter. The piece was headlined “The Most Irresponsible Tweet in History.”
Trump may be the worst offender today; but others as bad are sure to follow. Banning world leaders from the platform might be a loss for them, but it would be a clear win for humanity: minuscule costs with conceivably civilization-saving benefits.
Finally, in Trump’s case, there is an absurdity to allowing him to continue tweeting. The platform is now banning people with a few thousand followers to prevent the harm of online harassment—yet it abides a president taunting an erratic totalitarian with an arsenal that could kill millions in minutes if a war were to break out?
Twitter has long been accused of bias against conservative and right-wing accounts. Last month, they enacted what was colloquially called the “Great Twitter Purge,” ejecting swathes of right-wing accounts from the platform under their new rules against “violent extremism,” while allowing violence-supporting left-wing “Antifa” accounts to remain.
In November, Roger Stone’s “Stone Cold Truth” account, right-wing commentator and sci-fi author Vox Day, and Sam Hyde’s comedy group Million Dollar Extreme were all permanently banned from the platform.
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