“Our new ad,” reads the email with “Donald J. Trump” in the “from” field. “Watch it before it’s banned.”
The Trump campaign, the fundraising missive goes on to say, has begun a new advertising blitz to combat what it describes as “biased coverage” by the “corrupt media.” There’s just one catch: “Unsurprisingly, Twitter already tried to BLOCK one of our new campaign ads because it didn’t fit their radical, pro-Democrat agenda” (emphasis in the original).
President Trump has been the tweeter in chief for nearly four years but now finds himself in the midst of a two-front social media war. While Trump’s prolific Twitter use helped him bond with his supporters before he entered the White House, how helpful many of his individual tweets are has been the subject of debate for as long as the businessman and reality TV star has been involved in electoral politics. “The tweet speaks for itself,” is an important catchphrase for anyone serving as White House press secretary in the Trump administration.
Since the first time Twitter flagged a presidential tweet with a “public interest notice,” Trump has increasingly been inclined to address the concerns of his most zealous online supporters that the social media platform discriminates against conservative viewpoints in a way that cries out for government action. A subsequent Trump tweet was hit with a Twitter fact check.
Trump has always assured his supporters that he was carefully monitoring the issue of how conservatives are treated by the major social media platforms. But in May, he signed an executive order targeting their alleged viewpoint discrimination, allowing the creation of a tool to report bias to the federal government and potentially paving the way for a reinterpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
After the executive order, four Republican senators — Marco Rubio of Florida, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Josh Hawley of Missouri — sent a letter to Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging a “fresh look” at the law and requesting that the agency “clearly define the framework under which technology firms, including social media companies, receive protections under Section 230.”
“The unequal treatment of different points of view across social media presents a mounting threat to free speech,” the lawmakers wrote. “This Executive Order is an important step in addressing this form of censorship.” They added that companies “whose protections come from their acting as distributors, not publishers, have increasingly engaged in partisan editorializing, censorship of Chinese dissidents, and a host of politically motivated speech policing.”
This is a cause Hawley in particular has been associated with since arriving in the Senate last year following his victory over an incumbent Democrat in the midterms. Now, the populist lawmaker can rightfully claim Trump’s imprimatur in the midst of the presidential campaign.
But for Trump, the Twitter flame war raises two separate yet important questions. The first is the age-old discussion of how politically beneficial his unmoderated tweeting actually is. Trump’s initial public statements on George Floyd’s death after a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes were relatively measured. He expressed shock and revulsion at law enforcement’s treatment of a suspect, support for peaceful protests and a federal civil rights investigation of the matter, and opposition to violence and looting.
With the significant exception of the manner in which Lafayette Square was cleared of demonstrators before a presidential jaunt to St. John’s Church, the Trump statements that have aroused the most controversy were two tweets: one about a 75-year-old Buffalo protester who had to be hospitalized after being shoved to the ground by police whom Trump characterized as a potential antifa provocateur and another in which he said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
“If you’re a campaign that’s struggling with suburban white women, that’s probably not the best way to go,” said veteran Republican communications adviser Doug Heye. “But he’s found a way to feed off” the Twitter energy for much of his tenure.
The second question is whether Trump and his allies are right about Section 230, both in terms of whether they are correctly interpreting the law as currently written and what the consequences of their proposed changes would be for free speech.
Facebook has responded to these debates by trying to self-police, appointing an oversight board to mediate disputes about content. “It’s easy to be pessimistic,” said John Samples, an official and scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute who is one of the board’s members. “But free speech is deeper than we thought.”
The public policy questions are difficult, but the political consequences could be straightforward. The election results, like the tweets, will speak for themselves.
