@realDonaldTrump shows Twitter knows which side its bread is buttered

When Donald Trump first appeared on Twitter, two thoughts came to mind. The first was that he was an absurd candidate for the presidency. The second was that he had a remarkable intuitive understanding of the possibilities of 140-character discourse. In a public lecture some time after his election, I rashly opined that “Trump is to Twitter as Michelangelo is to sculpture”.

As ice formed on the upper slopes of my (predominately liberal) audience, I realised that this was not a tactful observation. Michelangelo’s genius, one infuriated listener pointed out, was deployed in creating uplifting works of art, whereas Trump’s tweets merely plumbed the depths of human nastiness. Which was spot on. But it nevertheless remained true that Trump is surpassingly good at what he does, which is polluting the public sphere, infuriating his opponents and pandering to the inner demons of his supporters.

When he took office, many people assumed that he couldn’t go on like this: governing by tweet. Trump has begged to differ. A smart geek, Russel Neiss, took him at his word and created a bot, @RealPressSecBot, which reads every one of his tweets and reformats them as official White House statements. The project was clearly satirical (and very effective in those terms). But in fact it was really just reflecting the new reality, as the hapless Sean Spicer (remember him?) once explicitly confirmed when he was employed as the president’s official spokesman.

For an analogy to Trump’s mastery of a new medium, we have to go back to the 1930s and Franklin Roosevelt. Like Trump, FDR faced a hostile media establishment suspicious of his New Deal. So he decided to go over the heads of the media moguls and editorial gatekeepers of his time and speak directly to the people, using the new medium of broadcast radio. For Trump, Twitter was his way of speaking directly to his base, the modern equivalent of FDR’s broadcast “fireside chats”.

After that, though, the analogy between the two presidents breaks down. As anyone who follows Trump on Twitter knows, his tweetstream is meretricious beyond belief, an unending torrent of lies, vulgar abuse, contradictions, mawkish sentimentality, incitements to violence and narcissism. Yet the world’s mass media are hooked on it like an addict with an intravenous cocaine drip. The question that incessantly comes to mind when reading it is: why does Twitter allow this? No other user would be allowed to get away with this.

This is the hook on which Twitter executives are squirming. Trump may be a son of a bitch, they say (privately) but he’s their country’s SOB. Also, he happens to be president. In addition, he has a band of fanatical followers who are armed and dangerous. So throwing him off the platform would mean a massive hike in their life-insurance premiums. They’d all need security details like Mark Zuckerberg’s. And besides, he’s good for business – their business, anyway. They are, after all, surveillance capitalists.

So what to do? Well, how about issuing a blog post entitled “World Leaders on Twitter: principles & approach”? Twitter, they witter, provides “a place where people can participate in public conversation and get informed about the world around them”. They “assess reported Tweets from world leaders against the Twitter Rules, which are designed to ensure people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely”.

But what if a “world leader” behaves badly? Ah well: “If a Tweet from a world leader does violate the Twitter Rules but there is a clear public interest value to keeping the Tweet on the service, we may place it behind a notice that provides context about the violation and allows people to click through should they wish to see the content.”

Wow! So Trump can continue to do whatever he likes but sometimes there’ll be a notice saying: “This tweet is from an asshole”? That’ll teach him. This is just the latest manifestation of the notion, regularly deployed by all the major social media platforms, that they have First Amendment responsibilities towards ensuring free speech. They don’t: the First Amendment is about government restricting speech. But these are private companies. They own their platforms and they can do whatever they like with them. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are privately owned public spaces, like shopping malls. They could ban Trump overnight if they wanted to.

They won’t, of course, because Trump is great for “user engagement”, which, to surveillance capitalists, means revenues. And the fact that the entire world seems addicted to Trump’s tweetstream is, for them, a feature, not a bug. The great thing about the First Amendment cant, though, is that it provides social media platforms with a high-minded way of obscuring an uncomfortable truth, namely that, online as well as offline, money talks.

What I’m reading

A crafty move from a prime mover
Ken Thompson’s ancient password has finally been hacked. Lovely story in the Register of how the encrypted password of one of computer science’s celebrated figures was broken. The nice thing is that it turned out to be a chess move!

Like a mighty river…
“Is Amazon unstoppable?” asks Charles Duhigg in the New Yorker. Answer: for now, probably yes.

Deep thought
“The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence”. So runs the title of an insightful essay on the Medium by Julia Powles and Helen Nissenbaum.