By Alex P. Vidal
“The more social media we have, the more we think we’re connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other.”—JR
I’M supposed to be a confessed dyed in the wool advocate of a free speech and free press, but how come I will not join the mob of those who demand for the blood of Twitter after it banned “permanently” the most powerful man in the world, President Donald Trump?
Didn’t Twitter violate Mr. Trump’s rights to freedom of expression?
Wasn’t the act tantamount to muzzling Mr. Trump, who had 88 million followers in the interdicted social media account?
We can cry out loud if we want to pick up the cudgels for Mr. Trump for this loathsome censorship in the social media platform, but Twitter’s moral obligation is opaque in as far as the civil libertarians’ paroxysm is concerned.
As a private company, this American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets” isn’t covered by the provision in the Constitution that prohibits any legislation abridging the freedom of the press and expression.
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Thus, we can’t place Twitter in a public box and demand for our constitutional rights so it will toe the line and serve our whims.
Twitter, as well as other private social media platforms, is not obligated to provide any special treatment to anyone who owns an account.
A Twitter account is a privilege, not a right.
Ditto for Facebook, Twitch, Instagram, SnapChat, Youtube, etcetera.
These companies can terminate any account anytime of the day if they determine the account has violated the company’s terms and conditions; if it finds the account—or the method of using the account—to be inimical to public interest; if it incites and foments sexual abuse, bigotry, hate and violence.
Even as advocates of free press and free expression, we’re hands off on this issue.
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Mr. Trump is old enough to handle this matter.
This is not the end of the world for him as a private person starting January 20 noontime.
But it would have been better if he had this account, which can help caution the impact of his inevitable life in the burning hell as soon as he loses power and becomes citizen Donald.
He has nothing to fret about, however.
For four years, Mr. Trump has used the Twitter platform to marshal his attacks against political enemies and allies who refused to obey his self-centered and Orwellian decrees.
He has benefited a lot especially when he used the platform to repeatedly lie about the election result; and, abetted by his enablers, poisoned the minds of his loyalists that the presidential race he clearly lost “had been stolen.”
His lies repeated, Twitted and re-Twitted several times became the Goebbelean truth.
We can’t either credit Twitter supposedly for stopping in his tracks a megalomaniac tagged as responsible for inciting a group of thugs and insurrectionists to commit the most abominable crime in America’s cathedral of democracy, Capitol Hill, on January 6.
Long before the outgoing President became a pariah, Twitter “slept with the enemy.”
It placed itself in the crime scene and technically became complicit to the Capitol Hill carnage by allowing Mr. Trump’s dangerous tweets that inspired bigotry, perpetrated a canard and innuendo, and helped the troublemakers think it was okay to storm and vandalize the people’s House and to attempt to kill the lawmakers for certifying a legitimate election result.
(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)
