I have complex and mixed feelings about Trump's Twitter ban. On one level it's obviously good, in the sense that it makes the world a tangibly, measurably better place. But oof, what a precedent.
It's not, obviously, a free speech issue. Free speech is meaningless if it does not include the freedom to exclude people from your platform. It's as insane to demand Twitter host Trump as it is to demand Eruditorum Press do so.
Nevertheless... a corporation just shut off the ability of the most powerful elected official in the country to quickly disseminate speech. That's a fuck of a rubicon to be on the other side of.
And obviously they always had that power. But they've used it now. It's not a thing that can happen, it's a thing that has happen and does happen. How many future uses of this power are good?
If a committed socialist gets the Democratic nomination, will Twitter shut them down? Legitimate, honest answer: probably, given corporations animosity towards leftism.
It's a clear step towards the cyberpunk trope of corporations being more powerful than governments. As, to be fair, the Trump era generally has been. A major effect of the last four years is the profound weakening of the American government's power.
"Incompetent fascist President completely fucks everything up and tramples institutional regard" is now in the realm of possibility, and that permanently weakens every subsequent President because there's now always the risk of another Trump.
And the fact that Twitter can now ban the President of the United States is a corollary of that. The Presidency is now weaker than a tech company. That wasn't true four years ago, or at least hadn't been demonstrated.
For the most part this is important more as a symbol than as a change. The change was over the past four years, as "Twitter bans the President" went from outside the Overton Window to policy. The last step was big, but smaller than the total of the invisible ones on the way to it
But oof. That's now the world we live in, and I'm unhappy to hear that.
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