Wednesday, 24 February 2021

Donald Trump's cyber-castration needs to be permanent

Thanks again for subscribing to CyberDisobedience. If you like what you read, please considering supporting my work with a paid membership. I’ve worked on my own for years, and its supporters like you who keep my writing and political advocacy going, so thank you in advance.

Thanks as always, and enjoy.

JOHN

Donald Trump's cyber-castration needs to be permanent

The Facebook Oversight Board is considering whether Trump should be permitted back on the social media platform.

John Aravosis

Feb 24

Did you hear the latest craziness from Trump? Yeah, neither did I.

After Donald Trump’s cyber-castration following the January 6th Insurrection, when Twitter and Facebook booted him from their services, the world has breathed easier as Trump’s deranged rantings took a permanent holiday.

Or did they?

While Twitter has permanently banned Trump, Facebook’s ban remains subject to appeal to the Facebook Oversight Board, “a team of 20 experts from around the world.” Trump has appealed the ban to the Oversight Board, which now has 90 days to decide whether to overturn it. The board has only heard five appeals so far, but did overturn Facebook’s ban in four of those.

It’s hard to understate how different life has been since Trump got booted off of social media. Trump disappeared from public discourse, not simply because he’s no longer president, but because he no longer has the ability to mean-tweet (and whatever word one uses for ranting on Facebook). The national temperature has cooled. The entire world no longer practices a daily doomscroll on Twitter to see what madness befell while we slept. And Trump’s own minions have lost the ability to regularly hear anything from the Insurrectionist-in-Chief.

If a man can incite a riot with his words, then the benefit of taking away his megaphone is obvious and immediate.

Having said that, I’m actually sympathetic to the position that Twitter and Facebook found themselves in, when faced all these years with calls to ban Trump. In addition to America’s ethos of Free Speech (and we do have freer speech laws than much of the democratic world), the Internet has always had a bias towards freedom (or anarchy, depending on your taste). People online don’t like being told what to do. And there’s a certain ACLU-esque beauty to that, the notion that a free speech utopia will let 1,000 ideas bloom. But in practice, freedom is often messier in practice than principle.

Donald Trump reveled in pushing boundaries. Whether that be American law, the norms of the presidency, or common decency. If anyone was going to push the limits of free speech, it was the man who always welcomed a double portion of excess. And push he did.

This is no longer a hypothetical debate over the merits of free speech, and the efficacy of fighting bad speech with better speech. On January 6, 2021, bad speech won, and seven people are dead as a result.

Perhaps it’s time we tried something new.