Game of Thrones, US Edition

Introduction

When Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, permanently deplatformed then president Donald Trump on January 8, he did the United States as well as the rest of the world a tremendous favor. Over the following week, the spread of election misinformation plummeted an impressive 73%. While certainly startling, this statistic is entirely consistent with another, earlier study that pointed to Trump as the likely largest driver of Covid-19 misinformation during the early months of the pandemic across the entire English-speaking world. With Trump effectively silenced, Biden’s inauguration on January 20 was a non-event, even at state capitols. It was marred only by dubious musical programming, whose most bizarre and least terrible moment was Lady Gaga impersonating Heidi at the Hunger Games while belting out the national anthem. In short, “Twitter and Facebook just proved that deplatforming works” (headline at The Nation).

The Waning Power of Donald Trump

A critical but under-appreciated reason for Trump’s deplatforming being so effective is his embrace of a performative macho masculinity. Trump has surrounded himself in office with (former) generals, directly appealed to law enforcement types, and made his mentor Roy Cohn’s attack-first style his own. He even staged a Soviet-style military parade, nominally on occasion of July 4, but it really was all about Trump, Trump, and Trump. His hurrah-patriotic law and order rhetoric has certainly fooled many, who took it at face value. But a careful observer is bound to notice that, when not making noise, Trump is an incredibly lazy and cowardly man. He has no substance whatsoever and always makes others do his dirty work. Sure enough, on January 6, he told insurrectionists he would join them in their attack on the Capitol—only to hide in his room at the White House and yell at the TV. Dorsey closing Trump’s Twitter account stripped him of his most effective way of making noise and some of Trump’s more sophisticated followers, the Proud Boys, soon thereafter noticed, publicly labelling him a “total failure” while permanently disavowing him as well.

Comparing a man’s power to his sexual prowess usually is a rather tedious exercise that only serves to reinforce hegemonic gender norms. The thing is: In this specific instance, it is not only justified but the very cringing it induces is instructive in that it mirrors the emasculation Trump received in the eyes of his devoted followers. Dorsey’s deplatforming decision then rendered Trump entirely impotent, with no digital viagra in sight, and the effect was so immediate and so total to suggest actual dismemberment. If you think that’s a bit much, I point to Senate Majority Speaker Chuck Schumer who seems to have harbored similar thoughts when he misspoke on the floor of the Senate, at first replacing “insurrection” with “erection” before correcting himself.

The Rising Power of Twitter and Facebook

To be sure, Trump’s permanent deplatforming from Twitter was an astonishing display of power. Only weeks ago, most people would not have wagered on the male CEO of an also-ran social network winning a power struggle with the so-called leader of the free world that would render the latter ineffective—for the moment. It doesn’t help that the former only has a tenuous grasp on his CEO position, which he gained by out-maneuvering the firm’s two co-founders and already lost once before. Furthermore, he is genuinely weird, with an appearance closer to a monk or Taliban than a billionaire and eating habits (once a day during the week, none on weekends) that point to body image issues more typically associated with teenage girls. Finally and most surprisingly, in this one instance, Twitter acted slower than Facebook.

That is surprising because the latter firm’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has neither the technical nor moral heft of Dorsey. He clings to his position only thanks to shares that inflate his voting rights in the yearly shareholder conference, where the majority of shareholders who aren’t Zuckerberg reliably vote against him. Given his limited abilities and ethics, Zuckerberg, who despite being a Jew even prevaricates about Holocaust denial, has a tendency to rope in others as foils for his platform’s abysmal record. Sure enough, his decision to deplatform Trump has been only temporary and the actual decision is now left to the so-called oversight board. Then again, maybe Zuckerberg’s very public indecisiveness when it comes these issues is the more savvy public relations strategy because it gives all stakeholders the illusion of possibly swaying his mind. Dorsey hinted at similar considerations when pointing out a week later that he worries about the precedent he just set.

In either case, Facebook’s oversight board must be the most elaborate and expensive Potemkin village ever created. It is staffed with highly visible academics and politicians. It also is well funded, thanks to a foundation financed by a generous donation from Facebook. But its much vaunted independence is a blatant lie, since Facebook has a nearly absolute veto right on cases the board considers and can always withdraw from the process without any financial consequences. In other words, Facebook can continue with business as usual. Sadly, those of us who are technically savvy and thus should know better often don’t hold Facebook leadership accountable, not even outside the public’s eye. When Turing award winner and Facebook’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun made a highly self-serving and misleading post on Facebook about Facebook on January 20, it received almost 200 likes and the vast majority of the 67 comments (two of which are mine) were approving. Maybe three people besides me pointed out the deep flaws in his reasoning and called him on it.

One Down, Two More to Go

While US Republicans weren’t too pleased about this deplatforming, the far more credible protest came from people who aren’t also craven insurrectionists, namely the French and German governments. However, the arguments made by Republicans, the French, and also assorted tech bros reduce to tiresome posturing about free speech. It’s curious that they remember free speech only when a straight white man is censored but not while that same man has been inciting odious prejudices and hatred while also spreading insidious lies, which all are key ingredients to fascism. They thus ignore one of two critical lessons from the United States’s four-year devolution towards the same under Trump: These aren’t just impolite outbursts on Twitter that can be compartmentalized away. There is no such thing as a little fascism that is safe to consume. (The other lesson is that fascism is utterly exhausting because the leader does not do any governing in the conventional sense but is busy staging drama all day and night.)

In contrast, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, raises a more direct and more effective objection, namely that it is unbecoming for an industry CEO to have that much power over a then sitting US president. She is right. She also is rather late coming to this realization, seeing that there have been ample warnings about the awesome power of Facebook and Twitter. That is particularly disappointing because Merkel, unlike most of us, actually has the power to do something about it. But like most people across the western world, she seemingly ignored the problem while the worst of negative externalities—genocide in Myanmar, genocide in Ethiopia, sectarian strife in Sri Lanka, and so on—were accumulating in far off countries. As the 2020 memo by a data scientist fired from Facebook makes ample clear, these are not exceptions but the norm. Twitter doesn’t figure prominently in these externalities simply because it is too irrelevant. It nonetheless deserves the same scrutiny because of its unique role as favored hangout of news reporters.

In summary then, Dorsey, Trump, and Zuckerberg are all three clear and present threats to freedom, democracy, and human rights the world over. That two of them are unelected technology industry executives makes them rather more illegitimate than Trump, who at least was elected once in 2016. But it also makes them far more dangerous in the long term because the very organizations they head are equal threats to freedom, democracy, and human rights and consequently neutering the four social networks operated by the two firms will be much harder than replacing the US president and his political appointees. As it happens, the executives have taken out the by now former president. It would be singularly foolish to restore the platform of the former president. Instead we should focus on neutralizing the threat posed by Facebook and Twitter. Using antitrust law to split the former into its constituent parts should only be the beginning. I’m pretty certain we can get US Republicans to rally behind that cause. What about you so-called liberals? Are you willing to form a strategic alliance towards that goal? I certainly am.