Here’s the truest conundrum of the social media age: Those who complain loudest about being silenced never ever shut up.
Case in point are some tweets this week from President Trump, who wrote his umpteenth in a series of attacks on the big tech platforms.
The latest sputter — that’s a digital equivalent that falls between clearing your throat of mucus and vomiting slightly in your mouth — was aimed at Google. In an angry finger-tapping burst in two parts, Mr. Trump accused Google of skewing its search results against him:
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation — will be addressed!”
Will. Be. Addressed. Oh my. Is that a threat? I guess it might be if you were a low-rent version of a movie gangster, obsessively searching Google News over and over again in the middle of the night.
But the big tech platforms should not be even slightly afraid since the threat is an empty one. The allegation is both wildly untrue and mostly easily proved false in all kinds of ways. (For example, I doubt that Mr. Trump has ever heard of page rank, since he recently showed he also cannot work a phone so well.)
Most of all, the allegation leaves out the pertinent fact that Mr. Trump himself is the most voluble politician ever to use digital media, and his entire existence has been amplified, echoed and re-echoed over and over again by the tools that Silicon Valley has let loose on the world over the past two decades. To say nothing of the widespread belief in the United States intelligence community that Russians manipulated social media in his favor.Rather than attacking techies, he should send them a gold-embossed thank you note.
Instead, as is his way, Mr. Trump huffs and puffs away on issues that have finally bubbled up to him from the ever-growing cesspool of online anger, especially the truly ludicrous idea that Silicon Valley does not like conservatives.
I can vaguely hear the always aggrieved tones of Mr. Trump’s tech whisperer, the entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, somewhere in there, who often goes on about having to move to … wait for it … Los Angeles to get away from the lefty groupthink in Northern California. While I am not going to be the one to tell him about those Hollywood types, it is extra rich since he became a billionaire via investing in all those supposed liberals, like those socialists over at Facebook.
That is obviously a joke, because, in fact, most tech leaders are more often lightweight versions of libertarians and largely apolitical except for backing gay and transgender rights and wanting to allow more qualified immigrants into the country to make more tech.
Otherwise, in my reporting, I have found that they love those tax cuts and adore the repatriated income and can’t get enough of deregulation. Sure, they don’t cotton to the anti-climate-change nonsense Mr. Trump spews and can’t stand the endless bullying, but let’s stop to reflect that they have handed him all the weapons in his online arsenal to do that.
So whether it’s the idea that Twitter “shadow bans” right-wing conservatives or that Facebook and YouTube have made a left-leaning decision that a vile and mendacious actor like the Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones perhaps needs to be thrown off services for his vile and mendacious behavior, it’s all codswallop.
You can look that fine word up on Google if you want to know what it means, by the way. That is also where you can also reach every single conservative, alt-right and white nationalistic site in a millisecond. And Google is just one platform of so many that have allowed every one of those voices to thrive and proliferate in untold — and in some cases, dangerous — ways.
It is certainly true that some of tech’s egregious sins — like allowing malevolent actors to use their platforms malevolently or disadvantaging smaller start-ups from innovating, which might be covered in Senate hearings next week where top Facebook, Google and Twitter leaders are expected to appear — need to be addressed by some sort of regulation to come.
But stifling even vile human speech is not one of them. It’s hard to make tech giants sympathetic, but Mr. Trump has managed to pull it off with cloddish aplomb with nearly every accusation of their being unfair in this regard.
Last week, for example, he tweeted: “Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people … People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!”
But it’s been Mr. Trump who has led the truth-isn’t-truth team that has tried its best to obfuscate facts by using social media to unleash so many lies that it drowns out all else. And it’s probably no surprise that conservatives made such good use of digital tools, having most definitely been largely left out in the wilderness of the old media equation for decades until Fox News arrived on the scene.
Tech has, in fact, been very, very good for conservatives from the get-go and very much so for Mr. Trump and his minions, as his 2016 digital media director and current 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, well knows.But it’s been Mr. Trump who has led the truth-isn’t-truth team that has tried its best to obfuscate facts by using social media to unleash so many lies that it drowns out all else. And it’s probably no surprise that conservatives made such good use of digital tools, having most definitely been largely left out in the wilderness of the old media equation for decades until Fox News arrived on the scene.
Tech has, in fact, been very, very good for conservatives from the get-go and very much so for Mr. Trump and his minions, as his 2016 digital media director and current 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, well knows.
And while I kind of get Mr. Trump’s demented tirades against what he calls the “Amazon Washington Post” — largely because its chief executive and founder, Jeff Bezos, utterly ignores the goofy smacks, even as the retail giant only grows in size and power — keeping tech free to do whatever it wants is beneficial for him.
It’s certainly not good for most of the rest of us, who have to wade through the ever-growing digital muck on a daily basis to utilize what is actually good about it. (It’s pretty much down to the game Fortnite and meditation apps now.)
What’s most interesting about the coarsening of the digital media landscape, which Mr. Trump has truly been an “innoventor” of (yeah, that is a term used in Silicon Valley) — is that it has had a discernibly bad impact on the very platform that he has used so well.
That would be Twitter. And rather than being boosted by the Twit in chief and the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to him, usage on the platform has continued to fall. In its last earnings report, the company said it had lost one million monthly active users in the most recent quarter.
While that is a result of a number of management snafus that have gone on since forever, it is also about the inability to clean up all the mess it has allowed to morph. Which is to say letting a thousand flowers bloom, despite the fact that far too many of them stink and more still are troublemaking bots.
That has meant that Twitter and other social media platforms have since become so much of a toxic swamp that it is now probably impossible to clean most of it up.
As one social media executive said to me recently, with an audible sigh: “For one set, we can’t take enough down; for another set, we can’t leave up enough. One side thinks social media enabled populism, while the other thinks the opposite. There will be no fixing this.”
Which makes for a kind of digital gridlock that is perfect for Mr. Trump, even though he seems to not be in on the giant tech joke he has created.
In an interview with Mr. Trump conducted by Mark Leibovich of The New York Times about a year ago, that much was clear.
“They want to take away my voice,’’ Mr. Trump declared plaintively, even as he bragged about the 54 million he reaches directly with every tweet on his @realDonaldTrump handle (along with 23 million more on @potus). ‘‘They’re not going to take away my social media.”
No, Mr. President, they’re not.
