Twitter didn't follow its own precedents when kicking Trump out. So what?
The Musk-ovites think that adhering to the rules is better than dealing with the emergency in front of you.
Bari Weiss released another batch of the Twitter Files today, documenting that the company kicked Donald Trump off the platform after the Jan. 6 insurrection even though no particular tweet met its standard of incitment and even though the company hadn’t kicked off other world leaders who had also behaved badly.
My response:
So what?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s very bad that all those other leaders said and did bad things, and it would’ve been nice if Twitter had taken stronger action against them.
But also: Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
What seems indisputable to me — and what Weiss and her patron, Elon Musk have to minimize — is that by the time Trump was kicked off the platform, the violence had already been incited.
By Trump. Using social media. And nobody really knew what he was going to do next. We’d already witnessed unprecedented violence at the Capitol. Who could say he wouldn’t try again in the two weeks he had left in his term? This wasn’t a dorm room philosophy seminar. It was an emergency. The leaders of Twitter — and Facebook, and other social media sites — had to choose whether to act or not. They acted. Good for them.
Weiss and Musk want to reduce this emergency to a simple set of math equations and pronounce Twitter’s answer wrong.
As an aside, Musk has previously revealed himself to be neurodivergent, and I can’t help but wonder if that comes into play here. Take this armchair diagnosis for what it’s worth, but I can’t help but see his comments here and be reminded of this:
Growing up, “the social cues were not intuitive,” Musk said when asked about it on stage at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Canada.
“I would just tend to take things very literally … but then that turned out to be wrong — [people were not] simply saying exactly what they mean, there's all sorts of other things that are meant, and [it] took me a while to figure that out,” he recalled.
My own observation is that folks like Musk are pretty good at fashioning a set of rules to navigate particular social situations, but can be thrown off-kilter when the context changes and the rules don’t quite apply. Improvising under such circumstances is clearly hard work, and I admire the people who make that effort. Some people can’t do it, or do it very well. And that dynamic feels very similar to what Weiss and Musk are offering here: An implicit ask of us to ignore a context to Twitter’s decision that was very different than anything that had come before. To make the rules so sacrosanct that you can’t deal with the situation in front of you.
They’re wrong. The United States is among the two or three most powerful countries on the planet. The consequences of letting everything fall apart because you didn’t suspend a guy in Iran are just too momentous to disregard.
It is troubling that Twitter had the power to essentially silence the president of the United States — and two years later, I still don’t have a good idea about what to do with that.
But I’m not sure that Elon does either. He’s clearly improvising right now. He let Kanye back on Twitter — then booted him off when Kanye resumed his antisemitic ways. Elon wants the leeway to make decisions that seem right in the moment, but castigates his predecessors for doing the same thing. That’s not the result of being neurodivergent.
That’s just entitlement.
I agree with 95% of this, but I’m not at all bothered about Twitter removing Trump from the platform. He wasn’t “silenced” -- he merely lost one way to address a particularly small (if overly influential) audience. Plus, he remains a former POTUS. He can command an audience whenever he likes. Just perhaps not on terms he can dictate.