I'm quite certain that for the past four years it has been quite a source of frustration for many people running Twitter that they couldn't ban Donald Trump from their platform because banning the President of the United States would have been more trouble than it was worth. I'm absolutely certain that the discussion of banning him has been held among the people running Twitter literally hundreds of times during these years, but they never dared to do that because of his current status. It's completely certain that for many years they have had their finger on the ban button ready to press it the very second that Trump stops being the president.
Well, it seems that they couldn't contain themselves any longer, and they jumped the gun. Donald Trump is still, as of writing this, officially the President of the United States, but Twitter couldn't wait anymore and just banned him permanently from their platform. Using excuses, of course, not any breach of their rules or the law (no matter what they claim).
I have written previously how incredible it is that giant tech megacorporations have more power than the government itself. They can do all kinds of things to people that the government cannot, such as censor them, ban them, punish them for whatever reason they want with no trial, without telling these people what they are being accused of, and without the people being able to defend themselves, punish them retroactively for something they did in the past that was not against the rules back then but is now, and so on and so forth. And the scary thing is that the megacorporations can do this completely legally. It's legal for them to engage in this kind of oppression which is so against the Constitution that even the government categorically cannot do it.
And what a beautiful example this is of a giant megacorporation wielding more power then the government: The President of the United States cannot legally censor Twitter, stopping millions of people from seeing what Twitter has to say about, but Twitter can legally censor the President of the United States, stopping millions of people from seeing what the President has to say about.
I think this has to change. When the service offered by a corporation reaches the status of becoming a de facto public forum, certain requirements of a public forum should apply. If the corporation chooses not to adhere to these requirements, the service ought to be relegated to being a publication, not a public forum, and the corporation should be relegated to being a publisher, with all the legal requirements and responsibilities that come with being a publisher (eg. the corporation becomes responsible for every single message published on their platform. If the message is illegal, then the corporation is responsible for it and can be punished according to the law, because they willingly chose to publish that illegal content.)
Comments
Post a Comment