After the attacks on the capitol building and Trump’s subsequent Tweets, Twitter announced the permanent ban of Trump. My initial reaction was much like the vast majority of the political left; I jumped for joy, I felt it was long overdue, relief and I appreciated him finally being muzzled from spewing garbage as easily. It has been a peaceful few weeks since he has been silenced.

But after the initial moments of my emotional response faded, I started to think about it at a deeper level. My conclusion is that although we have an immediate “improvement” I’m concerned that we’re reacting emotionally without fully thinking through all the unintended consequences and motivations by Big Tech.

If anyone deserves to be banned for inciting violence, it’s Trump. His entire political legacy is drenched in violence starting from his campaign rallies before he even won the 2016 Republican nomination all the way to the “trial by combat” that Rudy Giuliani directly pushed for moments before the capitol march started. And this wasn’t ordinary violence, it was to intimidate (or hang) elected Congresspeople into overthrowing a Democratic free and fair election! All in the name of his ego and inability to accept that he lost. This is completely unjustifiable.

A lot of hyperbole is used when discussing the attack on the capitol. I do my best not to join, but I do think there is a strong similarity to a different moment in America’s history. That moment is 9/11. People who were alive during the attack of 9/11 remember where they were, what they were doing and how old they were. It was that traumatic and important in our history. Although only 5 people died on the day of the capitol attack (now updated to 6 as an officer committed suicide from the fallout) on January 6th compared to thousands on 9/11, the emotional reaction felt similar. I could feel that we were going through a historic moment and I will forever remember where I was and what I was doing.

After 9/11, our country reacted forcefully and emotionally. Some good came out of it, like a renewed sense of country and community. But, much darkness came from it, too. We enacted the Patriot Act, we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the AUMF (still in effect and being abused 20 years later) and anti-Muslim sentiment and violence skyrocketed in America. Being against most of this at the time had one labeled as anti-patriotic. As the years went by, it became obvious to most that although our pain was real, our collective reaction and the decisions we made were disastrous.

As we navigate through the aftermath of the capitol attack and Trump’s Presidency coming to an end, I fear we’re going to make similar mistakes to our post-9/11 emotional destruction. Biden’s administration is looking at new domestic terrorism laws (aka Patriot Act 2.0) and it wasn’t just Twitter, there was a near simultaneous rejection of Trump by Big Tech. On the surface level, both things seem reasonable and justified. But, didn’t the original Patriot Act and war in Afghanistan seem reasonable to most, at the time?

To identify if Twitter’s response post-capitol attack is reasonable, it’s important to look at Twitter’s justification for why the final two tweets he sent were the straw that broke the camel’s back. They were tweeted on 1/8/21, two days after the attack:

1. “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

2) “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Twitter cites that “these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country…” and “President Trump’s statement…is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim…”

Twitter is right! Context matters. What someone says on a surface level tweet may not be sufficient to understand it without looking at all surrounding context. That’s an important concept lost in our modern political discourse, so, kudos to them. The second substantive point they make is that Trump’s words are being “received” or “interpreted” by his supporters in a specific way. This is accurate in that words can be interpreted in different ways, but it prompts the question: Who is the arbiter of how words are interpreted? The very people interpreting them (Trump supporters) or Twitter’s (a private company) analysis of what Trump supporters’ interpretation is? How about all of us who are neither Trump supporters nor Twitter employees?

There’s plenty of examples of Big Tech failing to live up to this responsibility. Just a few include the recent YouTube suspensions of Status Coup’s coverage of a peaceful gun rights rally in VA, a suspension for a clear “I’ll kill you” joke between friends, Twitter admitting fault for a “faulty algorithm” shadow banning 600k accounts in 2018, Occupy Wallstreet accounts being suspended, and Facebook shutting down a major left wing group in Britain, as I write up this blog entry. We still don’t have a legitimate answer on the justification for Parler getting unilaterally shut down by Google, rather than individual users who incite violence. Mike Lindell, the scumbag MyPillow Guy was also banned without tweets being cited for justification. The list is near endless.

As someone on the “far left” I have seen Big Tech, Main Stream Media and discourse “interpret” the words of quality journalist and analysists as conspiracy theorists, radical, bigoted and hateful, when they were doing no such thing. I have very little faith in Big Tech to fully understand and interpret people’s words in a charitable, objective, meaningful way, especially if it doesn’t line up with their goals. If we paused, breathed and thought about the big picture, I think most people would not trust Big Tech with this responsibility for anyone other than the big bad orange man.

The world and technology is constantly evolving, and Big Tech is managing millions of accounts, so they should be given some benefit of the doubt, however, we still have to ask the question “Should we trust them to handle this themselves?”

Another key issue here are Big Tech’s motivations for making this move now. One could argue that if you were going to move against Trump, years before now would have been justified. (Maybe they could have limited Trump’s harm had they done so.) Democrats have been pushing to reform or legislate Big Tech for years, and my opinion Big Tech’s goal is to do just enough to give the perception that they do not need to be regulated, since they’re taking care of business on their own. Of course it’s no coincidence that Twitter and co made these moves against Trump within hours of the Democrats winning control of the Senate after the two Georgia Senate races victories.

Private corporations sole obligation is to make as much money as possible. That is their motivation. If banning someone from a platform will yield more money, they will. If banning someone wouldn’t, they won’t. Avoiding PR headaches, boycotts and retaining customers is all a part of making money, and if bans and suspensions can help meet that goal, that is what they will do.

Often times in life it’s easy to criticize something, but it’s much harder to offer a solution. The “solution” to blindly trusting private Big Tech would be to have the government be involved, to some degree, and having the greater population contribute. This obviously is far from a perfect solution. The government is incompetent, corrupt and awful in many ways. However, the government, at least to some degree, is capable of being held accountable. Private corporations are not. Although both options are far from ideal, having to choose between unregulated, monopolistic, unaccountable corporations being in charge or a heavily flawed but accountable government contribute, I’ll reluctantly support government being involved.

I believe that internet access is woven into the fabric of our existence. The internet is here to stay. Because of this, I am a supporter of government run broadband internet for all. I believe that social media, whether we like it or not, is so fundamental to our existence that to ban someone from it should be viewed as stripping away their voice. We should treat it with the same level of seriousness. If you’re like me and believe these entities should be public utilities, then everyone should have access. And if everyone has access, I think they should follow 1st Amendment laws.

I’m not a big fan of “slippery slope” arguments, but I do think it is applicable in this moment. Not only do we have the other examples I provided above, but we’re already seeing the escalation of banning people from the internet like the below tweet by Anand Giridharadas (someone I typically respect and agree with on most progressive policies) wanting to go one step further. Instead of just banning Trump from Twitter, let’s just ban Fox News from existence! Silencing someone from speaking words of inciting violence is justifiable, so why shouldn’t informing people of misinformation and hateful propaganda that could lead to violence be just as ban worthy?

We need to be extremely careful at creating precedents, improve transparency and accountability, and fully understand the unintended consequences and slippery slopes we can create from Big Tech’s moves against Trumps. If we can stay calm, think things through and look long term, the silencing of Trump may not be the wrong move after all. I’m concerned we don’t do any of that though, since with him silenced, it’s so much easier to let Big Tech lead while we all go back to brunch.