Toward a separation of Twitter and state?

Politicians complain about Big Tech’s political influence. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told us that “Big tech’s power, bias, and censorship, is profoundly dangerous and it is a growing threat to our democracy.” Yet, he and others continue to use it like their political lives depend on it.

Increasingly, elected officials and government agencies alike use Twitter as the chief means of talking to the public. Senators and congressmen all have Twitter accounts and use them for public announcements, but also for engaging public controversy and sparring with each other.

Even the president uses Twitter in this way. No one did this more freely (though at times counterproductively) than President Donald Trump. For this very reason, it was a heavy blow to him politically when Twitter suspended him two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot.

Senators Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ted Cruz made headlines from their Twitter feeds in their continuing confrontation with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Elected representatives, such as Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., slug it out on Twitter rather than in the press or on the House floor, and news organizations simply reproduce the tweets as stories.

But Twitter controls Twitter-speech and thus controls the boundaries of what elected representatives can and cannot say. We saw this, for example, when Rep. Anthony Sabatini, R-Fla., tweeted “Kyle Rittenhouse is an American hero” during the man’s trial. Twitter suspended him for 30 days, claiming that his tweet was a publicly dangerous statement concerning a “dangerous individual.” Twitter effectively silenced someone who was elected to speak for the people in his congressional district. What does this mean for our political order? Does Twitter now have final say over what political leaders can communicate to voters?

Politicians once talked to “the press,” that is, newspapers. Of course, there were friendly and unfriendly papers that would shade your statement one way or another to make you look good or bad to their readers. But readers knew what they were getting. That’s why they read the Post or the Times, the Herald or the Globe. But if you were someone of consequence, you were news. Your “press release” often got picked up, reported, and discussed.

Things changed with television news. The visual became more important, thus the reign of the “photo-op.” Politicians later figured out the “sound bite,” a catchy phrase or brief declaration that the evening news with its limited time constraints would find irresistible. Cable news, with its need for 24-hour content flow, gave politicians greater access to the public, including lengthier, in-studio interviews.

Social media has changed the relationships once again. They are neither publishers nor broadcasters, but platforms for self-publication and for public conversation of whatever demographic breadth a user can attract. You make an account and people follow you—friends, enemies, reporters, and opinionators. As one can easily imagine, things can get wild. The big platforms, therefore, police their traffic with “community standards.” When it comes to limiting pornography and violent threats, we should be grateful for this power to some degree, whether we are users or not.

The problem is that social media companies make a corporate decision to follow a particular moral or political course, whether for reasons of profit or conviction. Corporate culture becomes insular with a distorted view of what reasonable community standards are. So, for example, tweeting that a transgender woman is a man or referring to “her” as “he” is deemed hate-speech unsuitable to be uttered in wholesome society. Allie Beth Stuckey was placed in Twitter Jail for stating (truthfully) that a New Zealand transgender Olympic weightlifter is a man. At that point, the big social media platforms are no longer moderating the destructive fringes of popular discourse, but suppressing and shaping the character of mainstream speech and thought.

That kind of control is unsustainable in an electoral system of government. The big social media platforms simply have too much control. For now, the worst abuses are more threat than reality—but for how long? Furthermore, there are no easy legislative or regulatory fixes. We are in a new world when it comes to social media, and our society lacks any real norms for guidance. But the politicians who expect Twitter to fuel their continual rise may soon find themselves blocked from their own voters. What will they do then?