Social media has often been a voice for those who go unheard, but there are pretty much always rules in place for whatever social media platform you’re using, terms of conditions that you have to abide if you want to keep your borrowed voice. Well, correction: there are terms and conditions you have to abide, if you’re not a socially privileged political figure with a penchant for verbal theatrics.
Twitter has been cavalier about doling out suspensions over things as simple as swearing at politicians or disliking Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” but it won’t ban the American president or remove his unsavoury missives, because his Tweets are “newsworthy.”
In a thread on the Twitter PublicPolicy account, responding to backlash to Trump’s “declaration of war” against North Korea, Twitter explained their reasoning: “We . . . consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules . . . Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest . . . This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it.”
I won’t get into the particular Tweets the president has made, because they — and he — are not the be-all end-all of what this is about. Twitter’s ridiculous policy about user conduct, which apparently gives violent or abusive Tweets a pass if they seem like news, gives the elite freedom to say far more than the rest of us can get away with, for no cost, and undermines the very free speech that social media toutes as a goal.
First and foremost: having “internal policy” about Tweets is ridiculous. You cannot make public rules about what does and does not constitute misconduct, and then when people call you out on not following the rules you agree on with your users, produce this new rule from nowhere as an exception. Until you actually have added this change to your “public-facing policies,” you should not be using it as justification.
When we agree to the terms and conditions, we are not just accepting that we’ll follow them; we’re expecting that both Twitter and fellow users will be held to the framework set by the rules. That’s not possible if Twitter’s going to shift its goalposts. How many other “internal policies” are guiding employee decisions about public accounts?
“Newsworthiness” is also an arbitrary category, in that it’s heavily dependent on the person making the Tweet, not the Tweets themselves. As seen with “covfefe,” and with headlines like “Elon Musk’s strange, strange Ambien Tweet” out there, it’s pretty clear that, when you’re famous enough, anything you say becomes newsworthy. When you say something scandalous, you become newsworthy. A big name and a controversy to match it become a brand that sells your stuff as legitimate.
By allowing that to happen, we’re essentially saying that politicians can do what they want. If someone like Stephen Harper or Kellie Leitch was to, say, drop a string of racial slurs on Twitter and/or otherwise harass a fellow Twitter user, you know it would make the news. Would Twitter defend that, too?
When elite people in cyberspace have this inherent release from the rules attached to their names, it further reinforces systemic, class-based privilege by letting them say things and commit offences that the rest of us can’t get away with.
I would like to call on Twitter and similar platforms not to show the infamous favouritism out of a misguided defence of the “public interest.” Keep things fair; that’s what’s really in the public interest.
