Trump’s war on the platforms is a familiar refrain. The question of what kinds of online speech a world leader should be allowed to post on social media is mind-bendingly complex, with tons of conflicting priorities and few easy answers.īut for me, at least, it helps to think of what’s happening as a high-stakes version of the drama we’ve all seen play out on neighborhood Nextdoor threads, fractious Facebook groups and rowdy Reddit forums for years. Twitter hid the messages behind a warning label, saying they violated the site’s policies against glorifying violence. In those cases, the posts were about the protests in Minneapolis, which implied that looters could be shot. Trump’s tweets and one from the official White House account. The war escalated on Friday, when Twitter took action against another of Mr. And he made it clear that he would seek to punish Facebook, YouTube or other platforms that interfered with his ability to communicate directly with his followers. On Thursday, he issued an executive order threatening to narrow legal protections for platforms that censor speech for ideological reasons, and sent his followers after an individual Twitter employee he accused, wrongly, of censoring him.
This week, President Trump declared war on the mods after Twitter appended a fact check to his tweets for the first time. And the people who make the rules - Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, and a handful of others - have become some of the world’s richest and most influential people, with the power to shift global politics and curate the information diets of billions. Social media apps killed the messy, unruly message boards and replaced them with slick personalized feeds.