It is also a terrible danger to allow the speech of elected politicians to be put off at the whim of unregulated Big Tech, with information from their anonymous “Policy Committees”, which are not accountable to society at large. In a vibrant democracy, it should be a concern that Jack Dorsey can intervene between voters and their leaders. For while most of us can agree that Trump has behaved terribly this week, what will happen next week? What happens when the people and reasons we are claiming are deleted? If Mark Zuckerberg felt Priti Patel ‘s speech on immigration was a breach? Or maybe we’ll never hear from Bibi Netanyahu or Jeremy Corbyn? The question is not whether you like what they say, whether you should deserve to hear it in the first place.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “Policy Director”, admitted to Joe Rogan that her decisions are based on “trial and error”. They are a mass of moral contradictions: a doctor banned for criminalizing vegans – but the folklore of the Chinese state remains. There is no real accountability here, no guarantee of consistency or fairness followed by Twitter assuming it is a “publisher”. If the threshold test incites violence, it is impossible to see how Ayatollah Khamenei is still on Twitter where he defends the Holocaust denial and calls for the abolition of the State of Israel. The same point applies to Antifa and Rebellion and Extinction and others.
Twitter is not a state broadcaster and is not obligated to broadcast anything. But what he should do is different from what he needs to do. It should step back from censoring public figures, allowing sunlight to be the best disinfectant, especially in a democracy with speech barriers according to the rule of law. To be a meaningful public space, social media should recognize that its power comes from allowing the public to interact with its leaders, without being hidden from them.