The suspension of president Donald Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts has triggered a heated debate on censorship and freedom of expression, the role and influence of digital platforms and the power of their owners to censor users and messages considered undesirable or that spread falsehoods and misinformation, that promote hatred and violence, and ultimately, threaten democracy.

Donald Trump raises very few doubts outside extreme right-wing circles. His actions as president have given rise to great controversy, and the support of the most radical groups of North American society, such as the white supremacists who stormed the United States Capitol, has been widely condemned. Trump is the most criminal president in history, according to Noam Chomsky, and in many ways, a major threat to the main democratic values. And this threat has been explicitly expressed in his political messages, most of which have been spread via Twitter, the president’s favourite media until very recently.

It is evidence that Trump’s attack on democracy has been intensifying and has adopted a more belligerent tone since his electoral defeat. And it is also evident that as of that moment, he cast all sorts of doubts concerning the legitimacy of Biden’s victory and the neutrality of the institutions that oversee the election process. Via Twitter, Donald Trump fuelled conspiracy theories, accusing these institutions, as well as the media, of fraud. Many media, even those politically closest to him, like Fox, reacted by censoring the defamatory, conspirational messages of a president incapable of accepting defeat.

Everything was accelerated by the results of the Georgia Senate and the storming of the Capitol where Joe Biden’s victory was to be ratified. While the extremists entered the chambers of Congress, Trump stocked them up and thanked them for their loyalty and commitment to democracy. It was the result of a process that had been brewing for some time. And, I stress, he had been explicit through his messages on social networks.

Twitter had reacted to Trump’s onslaughts by questioning some of his accusations of widespread electoral fraud, warning its users that some of his claims were dubious. But the president remained one of the platform’s main attractions, as evidenced by the response by investors to the suspension of his account. The first reactions from Twitter, which temporarily suspended his account, were followed by the cancellation of his Facebook and Instagram accounts, and the final suspension of his Twitter account. Snapchat, Pinterest, Tik Tok, Twitch, Reddit, and YouTube have also taken action along the same lines. And the alternative network, Parler, has been disabled by Google and Apple.  

And here emerges the second attack, another that has been brewing slowly, even more slowly than Trump’s. Some say it is no coincidence and that the one is linked to the other. Digital platforms, interpreted socially as spaces for public debate, have emerged as arbiters regulating freedom of expression and as the standard bearers of democracy. It is a highly complex issue. While the major digital platforms cannot be held liable for the content they publish, they are forced to implement content control policies to prevent the dissemination of messages deemed socially undesirable, such as hate for others, incitement to violence, or the spreading of misinformation, among many others. And breach of the rules governing their use can lead to accounts being blocked and even deactivated. And that includes the account of the president of what some consider the most advanced democracy in the world, the leading economic and military power, the man who has the nuclear button at his fingertips.

There are several questions that arise in this context. The first is almost obvious: did Twitter and Facebook need to present themselves as the architects of the expulsion of the US president from their networks, as proof of their power, demonstrating the inability of democratic institutions to curb Trump’s attacks and taking a stance as the upholders of democracy, being as they are, in many ways, a threat? Can controlling even the US president not be interpreted as an attack on a cornerstone of democracy? Is it not the culmination to highlight the errors committed over nearly two decades of transferring powers and privileges to the big tech companies?

I will not dwell on the question of law. There are experts who know far more than I do and have already delved into the legitimacy or otherwise of the response by the tech giants. I will focus on the reasons, on their timeliness and their hypothetical consequences.

So, did the tech giants have reasons for suspending the accounts of the US president?

Yes and no. Although the context in which the attack on Congress took place is extraordinarily exceptional, the messages that led Twitter to justify Trump’s permanent suspension (https://tinyurl.com/y6hefta9) do not seem to have the gravity of some previous messages that doubted the legality of the election results, spread misinformation and incited violence. The question is, why did the platforms act then, with their war offices shocked by the live images, and not before? Was the trigger being pulled then or had it been being pulled for months, even years? Wasn’t the decision by the technology giants one that sought to avoid incrimination, being pointed out, judged, for allowing the spread of for more undesirable messages?

Was it appropriate to suspend the president’s accounts during the storming of the Capitol?

In this case the answer consists of two parts. First, the timeliness associated with the hypothetical impact of the president’s messages regarding the behaviour of the attackers. Here we will repeat the famous formula of asking ourselves which is the part told by the media, and which is explained by structural, contextual and historical factors. I ask again: were Trump’s messages what sparked the raid? Were they having a short-term effect on the raiders? Or it was already unstoppable?

The other part refers to the impact that would be caused by the tech giants censoring the president elected by the American people. This censorship, as Jack Dorsey rightly manifests in a thread posted on 14 January 2021, demonstrates the failure of the technology companies to foster healthy debate, it highlights the inconsistencies of their policies, and presents them before the public opinion as a group of billionaires with the ability to silence the voice of the president of the USA. He therefore proposes the creation of an open, decentralized standard for monitoring social networks.

Dorsey highlights the concern and uncertainty caused by decisions like theirs, and underscores the feeling of institutional vacuum that many of us have felt. We are missing a link in this entire process that has either disappeared or has yet to take form.

Was it appropriate for Donald Trump to use the platforms as a privileged channel of communication with the public?

This is another issue that needs looking into in greater detail. I will just say that, if so, protocols for use should have been established in relation to his position as president of the US government, which, of course, should include the response to crises like the storming of the Capitol. Given the control to which government communications are subjected, the lack of any rules in this regard is rather surprising.

What are the potential consequences of Trump’s expulsion?

It is not at all clear. But, from the point of view of communication and technology, it is possible that these events will end up broadening the division in US society, and far-right groups and all those who have felt aggrieved by the actions taken by the tech companies will seek refuge in new spaces yet to be put in place. Ideological, discursive and affective polarization may give way to technological polarization that will once again place the platforms in the paradigm of broadcasting.

In democracy, an attack should never be retaliated to with another attack, although for some time now many democratic values seem to have been definitively under siege.