The US president has a lot of fervent grievances — everything from the “enemy of the people” news media to the “angry Democrats” supposedly on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team — but social media has now apparently earned his lasting enmity.
A few weeks ago, Gizmodo reported that Twitter appeared to be demoting some accounts with a long history of bad-faith engagement on the platform like white supremacist Jason Kessler and far-right activist Laura Loomer in search results.
After a grossly irresponsible VICE News article framed the search tweak as a partisan “shadow ban” against Republicans, Donald Trump weighed in with his characteristic mix of threats and bluster.
It looks like this particular issue is sticking in the president’s brain like a wad of gum just shoved in there, with the president sending out a lengthy tweetstorm on Saturday morning accusing social media of “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices” and “closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT”.
Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018
Trump then trotted out some rambling thoughts on the dangers of censorship, claimed he would never censor CNN or MSNBC and that “too many mistakes are being made”.
That last bit is possibly a reference to Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who recently found himself banned or suspended from every major social media platform, though really the president could be furious about some other obscure act of alleged censorship that somehow burned its way into his brain.
…..Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018
….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018
In other words, having graduated from merely tweeting to obsessively ruminating on the labyrinthine, never-ending series of injustices inflicted upon him and his fellow conservative tweeters by the social media bigwigs, Trump has graduated from being one who posts to being A Poster.
Never mind being president of the United States, soon Cosmic Brain Trump will just be tweeting “@jack delete your account #qanon #breadcrumbs” eight times a day.
The idea that social media networks are systematically discriminating against conservatives is manufactured from whole cloth — for example, Facebook is absolutely terrified of Republican backlash, while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been bending over backwards to please them.
And given that rules on most platforms remain so lax that even getting rid of Jones became this whole drawn-out struggle, one may wonder just whose voices the president thinks are being silenced.
Finally, Trump holds somewhat of an all-time shitposting record, dominates Facebook political ad spending and is the number one recipient of social media company favouritism, because as president he can say whatever he wants with total impunity.
Regardless, this is a rich new vein in the ever-deepening Republican victimisation complex for the president to exploit. So prepare yourselves, because he’s probably going to keep yammering about it for years.