10 January 2021 by Mondo2.0

Twitter vs. Donald Trump? Let us analyse them sociologically

On the night between 8 and 9 January 2021, the social platform Twitter decided to permanently exclude Donald Trump; this exclusion was motivated by, to quote literally, the “risk of further incitement of violence”.
A few hours earlier, the President of the United States of America had also been temporarily suspended from the Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Social Networks are a “hall of mirrors” that reflect our image infinitely many times (in this specific case, that of D. Trump).
Now, for the first time, a very high-level institutional figure enters the hall and does not see his image reflected; he cannot use the Internet as a global sounding board. He is virtually alone.

This is an epochal turning point for the Internet and Social Networks; communication experts, jurists and journalists are questioning this exceptional exclusion, with an extremely critical eye toward social platforms and the Net.

Can a social space, ideally open to everyone, exclude the President of the United States of America?

Let us try, in a few lines and in a simple way, to analyse sociologically the (real) context, social media and why we have (had) to arrive at this point.

The real question we must ask ourselves is not whether this exclusion is appropriate or late, lifesaving or anti-democratic, but rather: “What is the relationship between institutions and social networks?”

• Twitter is not a public service. It was not conceived, created or managed by a public institution. It is not a non-profit space for debate, it is not a school, a library, a public square or an agora. It is a private space, conceived exclusively for commercial purposes by a private company which, we assume, receives no public funding and has no public shareholdings. It is a space with very high management costs, used free of charge by everyone, whose objective, through advertising, is to engage and direct users according to their personal interests (do you remember our article on “The Social Dilemma”?).
• Twitter is a context, a space, that is completely virtual. Intangible, unreal. The number of people (real or avatars) and the number of tweets published do not allow, at least today, objective verification and supervision of what is online. Entropy is enormous, everything happens “real time”, so it is not possible to verify everything and, above all, to foresee the consequences of every post or tweet published.
• Twitter cannot be compared with a normal medium, a printed newspaper or a television news programme. In our view, Twitter is more similar to a pub, a tavern or perhaps, to be more current, a nightclub. A (virtual) meeting place, open to the public, privately managed for exclusively commercial purposes, aimed at socialising and entertainment. A place where there is a (generally mild) attempt to select incoming customers.

Our point of comparison, the nightclub, deliberately and provocatively takes us off course.
It is the antithesis of our subsequent reasoning.

In Mondo 2.0, social networks are not institutional, democratic, non-profit spaces.

Accessing a social platform to express one’s opinion is not an inalienable right; it cannot be, given the way the platforms themselves have (to date) been conceived.

If social networks were a democratic expression of citizenship, they should be managed by the institutions themselves; there should be institutions able to regulate and control them. Access, we say provocatively, to Facebook or Twitter in Italy should take place only through one’s SPID digital identity, and not through one’s avatar. Today on Social Networks anyone can be anyone and say essentially anything.

Social networks are “virtual nightclubs” where bouncers decide who can enter and who cannot, on the basis of “impressions” such as tone of voice, clothing or disguise, style, willingness, …

If the axiom described so far were true — “Social media are nightclubs where only those liked by the bouncer may enter” — the final thesis would highlight a huge critical issue: billions of people use these online services, follow web trends, are emotionally engaged by hashtags and the topics discussed, and are persuaded to buy, vote, act, …

If so, then the antithesis is wrong: “these spaces are much, much more than simple places of virtual entertainment, where entering or not entering makes little difference”.

They are extremely complex networks, virtual nations governed by managers. In them, the board of directors has the power to exclude anyone, even the President of the United States of America.

What if the next candidate for the White House were excluded from social networks during the first days of the election campaign? What if Google also removed the possibility of searching for the candidate through its search engine? What effect would these vetoes have on future elections?

If, conversely, Donald Trump had been excluded a month earlier, could the tragic and unjustified deaths at Capitol Hill have been avoided? Would the number of followers present in Washington have been lower? The intensity of the clashes?

We do not know how to answer these questions, but of one thing we are certain: the Net is increasingly permeating our daily lives. “Social platforms” do not correspond in any way to real nations, but they can influence citizens’ votes, actions and habits.

After complex reflections, we have arrived at an interesting, perhaps obvious, conclusion: Social Networks born with exclusively commercial objectives are now global tools capable of influencing public opinion, more than the institutions themselves. Not only that: the very cyber “intelligence” services of various nations use them in an attempt to influence socially or politically other antagonistic nations.

This extraordinary virtual power, which allows the spread of knowledge online, has accumulated and mixed with the power and charisma of real institutions and their main (real) protagonists.

When such great powers are combined, the birth of enormous paradoxes, fake news and exceptional exclusions is inevitable.
In a world where everyone can say whatever they want through the Net, the current President of the United States of America can no longer do so. It is social media overtaking Institutions.

In our view, the point is not the lack of “freedom of speech”, but the new, unexpected mutation of Social media in our Mondo 2.0, in which “Social Networks” are less “Social”. And who knows what will follow.

Mondoduepuntozero.

We believe it is right to remember that Mondoduepuntozero is only a game, a walk to take together on the Net; it has no purpose, neither commercial nor political.