Nothing quite says "the spell is broken" more than Twitter's decision to impose a lifetime ban on Donald Trump. If one had to point to the one thing that defined this Era of Trump Madness, it was those omnipresent tweets (ones I explored daily and tagged with #EverythingHeSaysIsALie ) which substituted for any and every aspect of an actual presidency: policy conversation, press conference, daily schedule and insult magnifier rolled into one, ugly, endlessly venal hopelessly untrue steamroller of disinformation. Without it, really, was there anything there at all?
Just days later, it's abundantly clear.... not much really was there at all. A silenced Trump may rage alone in the darkened halls of the White House, but without amplification, his sycophants grow restless, his party is rudderless and his opponents know the sweet air of freedom. How much different would our world be, or have been, had anyone had the nerve to take these actions years ago... when, just an aside, it would have been more than appropriate.
Within minutes of the decision - and the parallel, not exactly simultaneous decision to block Trump on Facebook and all of its associated properties - the right wing pundits had their instant storyline, one which thankfully absolved them of facing the aftermath of insurrection head on. Instead, we were gifted with a storyline about the Death of the First Amendment, the Unreasonable Censoring of Conservative Voices, and the "who, us?" excuse making of trying to argue that no one, really, could call Trump, or any of his minions, directly responsible for inciting a riot.
The decision fixed a heavy, awkward spotlight on the fledgling alterna-network for the right, Parler. Hastily assembled and built, according to the tech savvy, mostly on the "paperclips and string" approach to coding... Parler was already a bit of a stumbling mess as Trump's access went down - a hub of privacy invasion, bad infrastructure, conspiracy theorists pushed off legitimate forums... and the odd convergence of QAnon and Saudi exiles too eager to push the propaganda needs of the Crown Prince. Any port in a storm? More like Port of Last Resort.
In a rational world, Parler might have been able to buy itself the time needed to get itself together and to get serious... but this is the age of Internet Madness, and Trump's implosion only made Parler's underlying problems that much more stark. Having spent months trying to fend off reasonable requests from Amazon (its cloud server host) to better police the content floating through its social network, Parler's role in the January 6th events was bound to come under scrutiny, and it's failure to offer even a modest "lick and a promise" intention to clean up left Amazon little choice. Parler's arguably in over their heads leadership has tried valiantly to spin their disasters as that much more Unfair Censorship to Silence The Right, but even a minimal amount of research suggests a company that was simply overwhelmed by its users interest in a forum that let any and every crazy rant run free. And that's being charitable, since Parler even now can't seem to indicate what content it would moderate if it even knew how.
The reality is that this era we've been living through is, in many ways, the cusp of en ending, not the beginning of a New Age: a "wild west" of disinformation and questionable content, the various social networks have been struggling for years, particularly after the 2016 election revealed a debacle of Russian interference, fake stories, false accounts and deliberate propaganda aimed at fomenting civil unrest. There are no heroes here; only corporate entities with too much influence and too little oversight, gamely attempting to put several genies back into bottles. And while conservatives may have a point that some innocents may be caught up in the new oversight, that too is a tangent to a problem they've had for too long and done too little to police - a refusal to draw lines, and rule out obvious problematic actors and content pushing White Supremacy, Militia based talk of Revolution, and QAnon conspiracy fantasies. Yes, it's true Facebook and Twitter have all sorts of problems, failed enforcement and bad content moderation... but that's with at least a modicum of effort. Parler, god love it, wasn't even trying. And that failure to even adopt a fig leaf of "please stop, that's bad" just made the failure especially stark. No one's going to race to your alternative social network for more puppy videos. They want the hard stuff, the mean stuff... the stuff nobody else will let them say.
In all of this Trump was more symptom than disease - simply the biggest, worst, most prolific and most profligate example of a systemic failure to take action against obvious disinformation and malicious content. Every day, week, month, that passed it was grossly, starkly obvious that Trump flouted every possible rule and convention for content. Twitter (and eventually, Facebook too) had to step in just to acknowledge that virtually everything Trump had said regarding the 2020 election was a gross falsehood, flat out misinformation or deliberate provocation. And even that did nothing to slow the manufacture of lies, the fomenting of violence, the egregious bullying pushing things ever further to the edge. And what edge? Well, we need not ask that, not after January sixth.
It will take time, and effort to get things under some modicum of control - to push the fringes back to the fringe, marginalize the marginal, undo the massive damage to our culture, our discourse, ourselves. Like everything else, this isn't about "going back to before" - we are in this new Internet landscape to stay. But we already know that Facebook and Twitter can and will evolve, that they will not be exactly what they were, and though it's not impossible, it is unlikely that one man will be able to construct what Donald Trump did with his unique combination of avarice, idiocy, falsehoods and self interest. I do tend to think that, for better and worse, Trump's incendiary rhetoric was never so much a brilliant plan as a dopey use of bombast and bullying to play with matches and gasoline everyone else could see as potentially disastrous, even as he couldn't, or wouldn't. Much of the defense of his actions on the sixth are of the "he probably didn't mean to" sort and they're right up to a point: I don't think he meant to create what actually went down. But mostly because, I don't think he had thought that far ahead. And that, really, is the definition of incitement.
As for Parler and these semantic games the right would like to play about "free speech," I think time is running out on this "outrageousness dressed up as constitutional liberty" sales pitch. It's a tiring game of wrapping up age old prejudices in History Channel or Civics Class doublespeak that misuses faux intellectualism to sell the most anti-intellectual arguments imaginable. This isn't about free speech or even the outlines of a healthy debate; it's about one side's ability to mouth off without consequences and the other's to just take it. And that's just bullying, which is the ultimate point.
The jig is up, the game is over... whatever metaphoric cliche one likes, where we are isn't where we were even a week ago, and even with only about a week to look at, it's clear that Trump's absence, alone, from social media is already having an impact in ratcheting down the chaos and slowing down the fuse on its way to the powder keg of further internal conflict. Which doesn't make Facebook or Twitter heroes, just slightly more socially responsible than they had been. And that, alone, is the indication of a tide turning, that modest sound of us being our better selves, trying harder to get it right. Conservatives have a choice about whether to follow that tide or get washed away. We can't make it for them, I can't guess which way they'll go, but these pointless Parler games aren't really worth playing on the way to an outcome.
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