Friday, April 19, 2024

The undemocratic menace of social networks

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Cole Hanson
Cole Hanson
"Extreme twitteraholic. Passionate travel nerd. Hardcore zombie trailblazer. Web fanatic. Evil bacon geek."

Donald Trump wanted, in the last days, His comeback begins. We don’t know if he’s really thinking of 2024: That would be surprising. But we know that he wants to exist politically.

The man is energetic, of course, but he is struggling to renew himself and mentally locking himself in the myth of electoral fraud. His speech was hard. Trump is making the same mistake he made in his 2020 campaign: He is moving forward, but he does not have an agenda that, other than a few slogans, can paint a vision for the future of the United States.

Nevertheless, no matter what one thinks of him, he remains a central figure in American politics. It still dominates the Republican Party. He’s even, for now, the main opposition to Joe Biden.

Trump card

This raises the question about his presence on Twitter.

A few weeks ago, Trump lost access to his Twitter account. Banned for life. In other words, knowing the role social networks play in contemporary politics, he has been pushed out of the public space. Soon, many of them clapped.

But he is more than just a man, troubled like himself, who was expelled: he is an entire political current through which he is targeted.

Because Trump, let’s not feel weak in forgetting him, more than 74 million voters gathered around his name last November.

And even if many Republicans get tired of him, he remains the spokesperson for a large portion of the American people, who cannot be confused with the bizarre, fanatical figures who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

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But the primary is elsewhere.

Is it really up to social networks, those supranational digital empires of our time, to decide who has the right to access the public space? Do they really have to master public debate?

Can they sort out legitimate opponents and those who are not? Are they entitled, according to the old laws of exclusion, to prevent an entire political current from democratic debate?

And who will be next to suffer the same fate, and in which countries? Because they will come.

It is not a matter of loving Donald Trump, but rather a reminder that in a democracy, no one has the right to quantify or solve what he does not like.

Above all, social networks display terrible arbitrariness in their definition of what is acceptable and what is not.

Twitter

If they see hate speech in a strict or even subtle critique of the ideology of diversity (I’m not talking about Trump, here, who is less powerful than the flamboyant, especially imprecise!), They do not see it in those who hate for being hated by the evil white man who turned into a ram Redemption in our time. Against him, hatred is permitted.

One thing is for sure, this is grabbing the public debate by Twitter and its partners. It is much more important than one would want to say.

Here is the real coup against democracy.

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