Former President Trump announced, on July 7th, a class action lawsuit against tech-giants Twitter, Facebook, and Google, alleging censorship resulting from being banned after the January 6th Riots at the US Capitol. Mr. Trump has long been critical of tech companies and the power they seem to hold over the way political figures are propped up or punished depending on which side of the aisle they sit. The political climate is rapidly heating up as midterm elections loom and we must ask ourselves whether this move by Mr. Trump is a political stunt, or an important stand to help protect our freedom to express dissenting viewpoints.
At the heart of this lawsuit is the question of how much freedom is too much freedom. Over the past few years, we have seen near universal adoption of policies regarding hate speech that span from small businesses all the way to Ivy League universities. In the most extreme situations, not only are policies in place about what constitutes hate speech, but leadership has begun to set up “safe zones” where certain words or topics are not allowed to be uttered. More and more, it seems, we’re being taught that not only is disagreement bad, it is increasingly being seen as wrong. And if it’s wrong to disagree, the implication is that there’s only one correct way of viewing the world. I cannot think of a more dangerous precedent to set.
We’ve heard it said often – Freedom is messy. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Archibald Stewart in 1791, famously said:
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Imagine, if you will, two neighbors. Both with a passion for gardening. One neighbor chooses to grow onions, while the other prefers garlic. If they keep their crops on their own land, both are free to do so. This is a very tame example of differing opinions existing in a free society. Unfortunately, we don’t live in such tame times. Let’s take the same scenario, but now imagine that the neighbor that grows garlic has an allergy to onions. We now have a situation where one neighbor has the potential of a messy inconvenience. What obligation does the onion gardener have to stop growing onions? And if he chooses to continue to grow onions, does the garlic gardener have the right to destroy the onion crop because of the allergy? The respective answers to those questions are an emphatic “None” and “No”. However, when it comes to the free sharing of political positions through social media, we seem to be heading down a dangerous road where we’re being told what words/opinions are allowed, and, to revisit our metaphor, what things will get your garden destroyed by your neighbor’s angry friends.
Ironically, when defending their practices of deleting posts, or outright banning users, these tech giants point to the First Amendment for their protection. They are, afterall, a private company that can choose the type of business in which they want to participate.
These are not new arguments. In fact, when the internet was still in its relative infancy, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was put into place. It stipulates, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”. Simply put, Section 230 protects social media platforms from being held responsible for the content posted on their sites by users of the technology. This is often referred to as having a “Platform vs. Publisher” status, and it’s still used today by CEOs like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to justify why they should not be held to the same editorial and ethical standards as media outlets. But social platforms have evolved since those early days of the internet and we need to understand that they now play a vital role as “virtual street corners” which allow us to engage in mutual discourse. And when these platforms begin making rules about who can or cannot stand on the street in order to engage in discussion, we begin teetering toward outright suppression of speech.
Even worse, these giants seem to pick and choose when to enforce their rules – and often those capricious decisions heavily favor one specific, and very liberal, political ideology. Look no further than November 2020 when Steve Bannon’s accounts on Twitter and Youtube were suspended due to him describing a day dream of a violent death for the ancestors of Dr Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. That very week, Kathy Griffin retweeted a now infamous picture of her holding a bloody and severed prosthetic head of President Trump – Twitter took no action to remove that post. Both instances were unnecessarily violent and disgusting. The only difference was that Griffin’s ideology agreed with that of Twitter’s CEO. Bannon’s didn’t.
Getting back to Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, we find ourselves at a crossroads between big tech and how speech can be protected.
By and large, Facebook, Google, and Twitter leadership point a virtuous finger in the air and defended their actions by highlighting the violence of the January 6th Capitol Riots, and the alleged roles certain groups or individuals (including Mr. Trump) played in potentially setting the scene for what happened on that day. However, if quelling violence is their goal, one must wonder why groups associated with Antifa and BLM are able to use these same platforms to post violent messages and arrange protests that inevitably turn into riots which have led to far more damage, death, and destruction than what occurred on January 6th. It seems there is more at play.
It’s clear there is more work to be done when considering the power and influence these tech companies hold in today’s exchange of ideas. Mr. Trump understands this, and while congress continues to prove ineffective and not up to the task, he has chosen to fight on another front. No matter how ideologically driven tech leaders are, there is another factor they must consider. Their financial bottom line. Launching a class action lawsuit will not only get the attention of lawmakers as it winds its way through the Judicial system, but board members and stockholders will begin to take notice as well. And, depending on the outcome, these leaders may be compelled to revisit their inconsistent actions, not because it’s the right thing in their eyes, but because their livelihood may depend on it.