Was D. Trump’s Social Media Suspension for Good or for Bad?
Thoughts on how social media affect some of the most essential human rights.
It has been over a month since Donald Trump’s access to his facebook and twitter accounts has been suspended. While I am not one of Trump’s supporters — in fact, ideologically, I lie on the opposite side — this series of suspensions has been quite alarming. It is not that I will miss his morning tweets about how important a see-through wall is for the nation’s security according to his so-called “wall experts”. What sounds so dystopian is that (large) corporations are legally allowed to have such a huge impact on the way people express themselves and, consequently, on the extend to which freedom of speech is restricted.
A matter of ethics
On a moral level, allowing a private sector company control the way in which an individual may express their opinion in public sounds and actually is unacceptable. Freedom of speech is a granted human right and, as such, it is responsibility of no one other than the state itself to suspend it — which should only happen on extreme and rare occasions. Given that none of the major social media companies happens to be state property, it is evident that their decision to suspend the account of one of their users is, at least, debatable, especially when one thinks that that one user was one of the most powerful political leaders in the world.
Seeing some eyebrows raised, I should explain the above in more detail. As I said above, the matter is not Trump himself — probably a rare occasion — but the fact that large businesses took a decision that had direct impact on one’s right to express themselves and, notably, this decision was against a politician. No matter how wrong and irritating D. Trump has been over the previous four years — and he has, for sure — no matter how insulting it has been, this is a seminal moment in human history: businesses managed to effectively restrict the political power of a running president of the United States of America.
A line of attack to the above could be that, while Trump is not allowed to express himself freely on facebook and twitter, nothing poses an obstacle to him expressing his views through other channels. While true, the above ignores the way in which modern day western societies function. With about two billions of people using social media extensively, disallowing one from communicating their ideas through them is almost equivalent to muting them. To verify this, just think how are you mostly informed for almost anything — be it a weather forecast, sports, politics, arts and the list goes one.
Furthermore, it is the symbolism carried by this action that matters. In a democracy, the source of power is us, the people. All actions regarding us and our rights should originate either immediately from us or our elected representatives. Under this perspective, facebook and twitter are by no means entitled to disallow anyone and, especially, an elected representative of the state, to express their views in public.
This is a seminal moment in human history: businesses managed to effectively restrict the political power of a running president of the United States of America.
A matter of law
All the above arguments were clearly based on moral views of reality, highly ignoring the legislative basis upon which we should rely. Given the fact that facebook and twitter, and any other social media company, are just private sector companies which offer a very certain type of products, then they clearly maintain the legal right to exclude whoever they wish from their services. Moreover, they do not even need to provide some in depth explanation about why they decide to do so — which, however, is not the case with D. Trump’s suspension.
Furthermore, as commented above, there is no actual attack against no one’s right of free speech, given that facebook and twitter are not the only places in which one can express themselves. In fact, it is not even their responsibility to allow for every view to be heard, so long as this does not conflict with any other of their legal duties. Bearing this in mind, our discussion about whether social media companies are allowed to ban users — no matter of e.g. their political status and significance to the state — from their platforms or not should end here.
Nevertheless, we shall also bear in mind that laws are not given by some supernatural entity or some oracle of wisdom. Laws are the cornerstone of our democracies, but they have been and constantly are being made by us. Their purpose is to reflect our societies’ moral values while at the same time they preserve all our rights. In this direction, laws are — or, at least, should be — a living part of any democracy and, as such, subject to change.
How could one ensure access to water when they do not have control of the city’s largest aqueduct?
Consider the case of a city lying underneath a mountain. Also, imagine that this city’s sole water source are the springs found on that mountain and several large and small aqueducts that connect these springs to the citizen’s homes. Now image that the citizens have lost control of their largest aqueduct to some single citizen, let us call him X. Do not picture that X guy as some notorious figure who wants to pollute the city’s water supplies or blackmail its citizens for his own purposes. Think of him more of some successful guy who managed, possibly through totally legal means, to claim control of the city’s largest aqueduct — it is not that far from reality as it might seem.
Then, how could one ensure access to water when they do not have control of the city’s largest aqueduct? Even if, in theory, all citizens can walk all the way up to the mountain and get as much water as they need, at any given time, the X guy may decide to block access to his aqueduct, significantly lowering the water supply in the city. Evidently, while citizens have a way to get as much water as they may wish in case their access to the city’s aqueduct is restricted — by downshifting to pre-aqueduct methods — this consists a substantial deterioration of their level of living.
At this point, the analogy with our situation should be clear. Free speech and our right to it is the water of the above city while social media companies play the role of that X guy: They control the channels through which our rights are practiced. So, given the above, is it wise to allow for such “X guys” hide behind partially ineffective legislation and keep silently control of our rights’ aqueducts.
Epilogue
While there is no legal ground upon which one could claim that social media companies should not ban users since this directly conflicts with some of their elementary human rights, it seems that the time has come for this discussion to open. It is probably the first time in human history that a key human right is — up to now passively — monitored not by the state but by private sector agents. It is also possibly the first time in modern history that such a situation seems almost absolutely normal, like this is the way it should be. But, after all, is it?
