Twitter’s banning of Trump: The privatization on the public square

Content posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may feel public, but it is not under the First Amendment protection since these platforms are private.

By HERB KEINON
US President Donald Trump taps the screen on a mobile phone at the approximate time a tweet was released from his Twitter account, during a roundtable discussion on the reopening of small businesses in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, US, June 18, 2020. (photo credit: REUTERS/LEAH MILLIS/FILE PHOTO)
US President Donald Trump taps the screen on a mobile phone at the approximate time a tweet was released from his Twitter account, during a roundtable discussion on the reopening of small businesses in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, US, June 18, 2020.
(photo credit: REUTERS/LEAH MILLIS/FILE PHOTO)
How’s this for irony: US President Donald Trump can’t tweet, but he can conceivably still launch a nuclear missile.
Trump can’t tweet or post on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat because those social-media platforms have determined that his words risk incitement to violence. He can still launch a nuclear war, however, because Congress has not removed him from office for having committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” though some are hoping that it will do so before his term runs its course on January 20.
The decision of the social-media behemoths to bar Trump has raised a variety of ethical and constitutional questions, such as who set the social-media platforms up as the arbiter of what the public can hear and read, and what criteria are used to ban one person but not another. For instance, how is it that Trump is banned, but Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei is not.
One argument that is made by Trump’s supporters is that Twitter – by blocking the president from using his favorite platform – is violating his First Amendment rights to free speech. But that is an erroneous understanding of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment of the Constitution said that Congress – meaning the government – cannot enact laws abridging freedom of speech, but private companies are not under similar obligations.
Twitter isn’t saying that Trump can’t speak his mind; it is just saying he can’t speak his mind on their private platform.
The confusion exists because while content posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may feel like it is in the public sphere, it is not; it is in the private sphere.
Facebook and Twitter have managed to privatize the public square. In other words, content posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may feel public, but it is not under First Amendment protection since these platforms are private. These platforms allow people to post their content out of “grace,” rather than out of any sort of privilege or right.
“Trump has been abusing these platforms for years,” said Mike Dahan, a lecturer in Sapir Academic College’s Communications and Public Policy Department. “When it was financially feasible and contributed to the bottom line of these companies, for the most part they did not censor him.” However, he noted, “when he blatantly violated their terms of use, they terminated his account.”
As private domains, these social-media giants have the right to set the rules for participation and, if they are violated, to kick out the violator.
An analogy could be made with a newspaper. For instance, no one would accuse The Washington Post of violating Trump’s freedom of speech for not publishing an op-ed he wrote. Why not? Because the paper, as a private institution, can choose what it wants to print on its pages. And if The Washington Post would not run a Trump op-ed, he could try to peddle it elsewhere.
And that is where the problem begins. There are many other papers Trump could turn to. There are not, however, many other platforms with a reach like Twitter or Facebook. So the issue becomes less one of free speech and more one of monopolies – an antitrust issue dealing with key platforms being held in the hands of a few.
“We’re now living in a country where four or five companies – unelected, unaccountable – have the power, a monopoly power to decide, We’re going to wipe people out; we’re going to just erase them from any sort of digital platform,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said Sunday on Fox News.
And it is not only on the Right where this concern is being raised. The American Civil Liberties Union also voiced its worry, saying: “It should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.”
According to Michael Brennan, of a Washington think tank called the Democracy Collaborative, this “raises broader questions about accountability and decision making in a democratic society. The role of the media and the role of our communication channels is pretty central to the ability of citizens to make decisions in democracy. For those [channels] to be monopolized by giant tech corporations creates a situation where they essentially control what information gets out to the public, and it has become very clear how they directly intervene into the democratic process.”
Maayan Hoffman contributed to this report.


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