As political ironies go, U.S. President Donald Trump’s tirade against social medial platforms is a class apart. After Twitter flagged two of his posts as factually inaccurate, the President threatened to “strongly regulate” or “close down” all social media platforms. Like most of his statements, this one too appeared on Twitter where he has 80.4 million followers. When Mr. Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, critics scorned him as a mere, inconsequential Twitter handle, for his acerbic posturing on the platform. But outrage is richly rewarding on digital platforms, as he went on to prove. Twitter too was a beneficiary in the process. The crafty use of social media for incendiary politics the world over scraped the shine off these decentralised and unregulated platforms that were initially hailed as prodigiously democratising. Controversies erupted in quick succession, including their role in genocides and election rigging. The misuse of social media to spread falsehoods that often incite violence has been a particularly tricky question. These platforms have often declared their commitment to stop fake news, but any attempt to enforce content regulation comes with additional complications, as Twitter’s attempt to fact-check the President shows. The intention to ensure all political discussions are fact-bound and shorn of inflammatory rhetoric is laudatory, but no one body can be the enforcer in this.
The current conflict between the President and social media platforms is only a component of the ongoing wider debate in the U.S. on the nature of large tech companies. Big tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple have given rise to concerns of privacy, data misuse, political bias, monopoly behaviour, tax avoidance and national security. In the U.S., there is a common ground among the Democrats and the Republicans that these tech companies need to be reined in. Republicans say social media platforms are anti-conservative. Democrats believe some of these platforms are easily manipulated by enemies of the nation and accuse them of unfair trade and labour practices, and call for breaking them up. Facebook’s attempt to launch a digital currency Libra has triggered sovereignty concerns among nations. It had to pay $5 billion in fines to settle investigations into its misuse of data in the Cambridge Analytica controversy . These companies boast of being global and able to fly above the eyes of government. Some reordering of that arrangement appears to be on the horizon. But it would be a pity if the trigger for the overhaul is one social media platform’s attempt to call out the irresponsible statements of the world’s most powerful leader.
