Elon Musk‘s aim of restoring former President Donald Trump to Twitter could pressure competing platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, to allow Trump to return as well.
Musk said Tuesday that once he takes full control of Twitter in a few months, he plans to reverse the platform’s permanent ban on Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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Facebook is already scheduled to revisit its ban of Trump in January 2023, while YouTube has said it will lift its suspension on Trump’s account when it determines the risk of violence has decreased.
“With Musk’s new management of Twitter and a potential Republican sweep in the 2022 midterms, I think it is likely that Trump would be reinstated onto Facebook at this time, with similar action to follow from YouTube,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at centrist think tank the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
“I’d expect Trump to formally return to Twitter around this time as well,” Brooking said, referring to Trump’s desire to tap into his large and popular following on the platform in order to boost his 2024 election chances despite claiming that he will only post content on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
Conservatives say Musk allowing Trump back on Twitter could give Facebook and YouTube political cover to make a similar choice without facing intense blowback.
“All of these Big Tech companies operate in lockstep, so by Musk going in a different direction, that breaks up their little cabal or encourages them to do the right thing and let Trump back,” said Dan Gainor, vice president at the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog tracking censorship on Big Tech platforms.
“Musk would take all the heat on bringing Trump back, and we’d have a big debate and he’d get criticized, and then Facebook and YouTube could unban Trump after that with much fewer bashings,” said Gainor.
Trump’s return to Twitter could also lead to new scrutiny of the decisions by Apple and Google to restrict rival social networks from their app stores.
“We know from past examples that these tech companies often look to each other’s content moderation decisions to provide themselves with cover — Alex Jones, Trump, and the Hunter Biden story all come to mind,” said Jon Schweppe, the director of policy and government affairs at the American Principles Project, a conservative advocacy group.
Schweppe was referring to controversial users and content that have been collectively banned from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other major social media platforms.
“The interesting wrinkle in all of this is the app stores. Do Apple and Google give Twitter the Parler treatment for allowing free speech, which might violate their terms of service? That would be absurd, but the Left will certainly call for it,” said Schweppe.
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Parler, which is popular with conservatives and has billed itself as a free speech alternative to Twitter and Facebook, was banned by Apple, Google, and Amazon in the days after the Jan. 6 riot, which the tech companies said Parler helped encourage.
The action against Parler angered those on the Right, with conservatives claiming that the collective decision by the Big Tech platforms is evidence of their left-leaning bias.
Some liberals say they would like to see Trump return to Twitter and other platforms but without the same virality and visibility that he had when he was on social media in 2020.
“His voice deserves to be heard. I’m not for deplatforming Trump, but he shouldn’t be the central point of focus on the platform, especially due to his inflammatory comments and false statements,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a tech and sociology professor at UCLA.
“What was occurring on Twitter before Trump got banned was a large share of disinformation on the platform came from him, so we want to turn down the dial on that even if he’s still on the platform. Just make his content less viral,” said Srinivasan, who wrote a book about tech companies, Beyond the Valley, and served on the Biden-Harris innovation policy committee.
Other liberals are more skeptical of whether Trump’s return to Twitter under Musk’s ownership could result in him getting unbanned by other social media giants.
Mary Anne Franks, a law professor who specializes in tech companies at the University of Miami, says that if Musk really does scale back moderation on Twitter and allow Trump back on the platform, it’s quite likely that Twitter will start to look a lot more like free speech-oriented platforms such as Gab, Parler, and other social media sites that she said struggle with spam, bots, and low-level content.
“That will make other platforms that make different and more principled choices more appealing to users, encouraging Facebook, YouTube, and others to stick by their decisions to keep Trump banned.” said Franks, author of The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech.
Franks added that those against Trump’s ban on Twitter, mostly conservatives, will gain momentum in their fight to allow more speech on social media if Musk allows Trump back on the platform.
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“It will certainly provide ammunition for the constitutionally illiterate extremists who claim that tech companies enforcing their own rules somehow violate the First Amendment,” Franks said.
