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So forever.
Not only Facebook, Twitter also shows Donald Trump the door.
At first it looked different: after Twitter barred the 45th US President from using his services on Wednesday, he was back the next day.
With a video message in which Trump, when he said that he did not want to stand in the way of the handover to Joe Biden, presented the decline stage of a long-awaited “concession speech”.
And with a condemnation of the excesses on Capitol Hill on January 6th.
Which was delicate insofar as these excesses had the following reasons: Trump's refusal to recognize his defeat in the November election, the baseless claim that the election had been "stolen" from him and his supporters and finally the invitation to his fans to go straight there to march, where elected representatives would confirm Biden's election as 46th President of the United States.
It was understandable that Twitter temporarily blocked the president on Wednesday.
He had tweeted the partly armed and according to plan intruders on Capitol Hill early on to go home.
In the same breath, Trump repeated the myth of the stolen election.
The danger seemed too great that an arsonist in the Oval Office would use his most effective mouthpiece to pour oil on the flames of a situation of which it was by no means clear whether there was really an attempt, the peaceful handover to the newly elected Prevent President on January 20th.
Privatization of politics
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Twitter and Trump, that was a delicate matter even before January 6th.
Because not least the millionaire from Manhattan made the short message service what it is.
He also changed the way politics is made today: Twitter is the address where you can first find out what all countries have to say about the current world situation.
Regardless of whether some viewers of the “Tagesschau” are still queasy today when they read out what Trump, Johnson, Macron etc. have declared “on Twitter” as if they were official statements by governments.
Trump and Twitter, that was a “match made in heaven”: Nobody knew how to use the “secondary orality” of social media, as Walter J. Ong called it, as well as Trump.
The spoken language-oriented, direct addressing of every single follower on Twitter fitted all too well with the message that this president embodied: “In the end, it is only up to you to make something of yourself, the means are unlimited others are against you, rules are for losers and if you fail, that's exactly what you are: a loser. ”It was only logical that this message was heard in thousands and thousands of tweets not from the official @ Potus but from the personal @ realDonaldTrump account .
The reality of social media goes hand in hand with a “privatization of politics”, as the democracy theorist Tom Wohlfarth once described.
Of course, this can also be observed beyond the main and state actions.
Almost everything on Twitter is personal.
Arguments against what is being said there often do not hit what is said, but rather those who utter it.
Personal well-being is very important.
Those who injure them can suffer the fate of being “canceled”: You just don't follow them anymore.
What wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for publicly expressed moral condemnation.
“Blocklists” are displayed on Twitter like trophies.
45 percent are not against storming the Capitol
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The fact that Twitter himself has now officially and ex cathedra canceled Donald Trump, with whom they had been in something of a coevolution for many years, also follows the logic of their own platform and the type of communication that prevails here.
Last year, the company had already started to mark Trump tweets alleging untruths with appropriate references.
But who would have wanted to prevent the short message service from making use of house rights and fulfilling its responsibility as a platform operator?
It was obvious that the success of Trump's blatant lies was based on the fact that Twitter built a tailor-made bridge for him to each and every one of his more than 88 million followers.
Now the company also benefits from the ghosts it called.
January 6th offers an “easy way out” for Twitter.
With concerns that Trump could use the short message service to incite further violence, they justify the blocking of @realDonaldTrump.
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It remains to be seen how valid these concerns are.
There are other kinds of concerns that stand up considering that not only Twitter but Facebook have locked Donald Trump's accounts.
In addition, the tech giants Apple and Google have decided not to sell the "Parler" app, which is popular with Trump fans.
Great concerns
First of all, there are quasi-intelligence concerns: 45 percent of Trump voters, according to a poll by YouGov, explicitly do not condemn what happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Even if it is a scandal that some of those who broke into the Capitol were able to arrange everything more or less publicly on social networks and nobody did anything about it, it must be worrying to imagine that Trump and his supporters, some of whom are violent, are dragging themselves into darker corners of the internet, in order to think of even worse in the future.
What they will do, even more undisturbed than in recent years.
Has already been to the Capitol: Facebook boss Zuckerberg
Source: Getty Images
The fact that the tech giants of this world decide to show one of their top users the door could also backfire in another respect: Because anyone who believes in far more abstruse theories than that of a stolen election will only be faced with the lockdowns Add one and one together to confirm the assumption of a supposed conspiracy by the entire Big Tech complex.
The hatred of democracy and the establishment that drives the extremist Trump fans will be fueled by the Trump blocking on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter & Co. are not the fourth estate
The real scandal, however, is to be found elsewhere.
It lies in the abundance of power of the tech oligarchs themselves, and this is revealed in Trump's lockdown.
“I don't think the security of our republic should be the responsibility of Mark Zuckerberg.
The fact that we have ceded control of our public, discourse and even democracy to a small handful of tech oligarchs is deeply worrying and will almost certainly have undesirable consequences, ”said Thomas Chatterton Williams in an interview with the newspaper.
We must agree with Williams and add that this is not just a US problem.
It is unacceptable that Twitter, Facebook and Co. determine the fate of public opinion in our societies.
It is also unacceptable that the tech oligarchy uses its abundance of power to put into practice what one is only used to from illiberal regimes (and what some Twitter clique from the left or right does on a small scale): namely, silencing politically unpleasant positions close.
Even those who now breathe a sigh of relief because Donald Trump is now barred from spreading dangerous lies, slander and racist abuse every 480 characters, will not be able to avoid recognizing the monstrosity of an abundance of power that is revealed in the fact that multinational corporations can silence an incumbent US president almost completely.
That you are more powerful than the most powerful man in the world.
Twitter, Facebook and other tech giants are not the fourth power in the state.
Their task cannot be to actively influence the formation of political opinion by deciding who is allowed to speak and who is not.
Newspapers can overthrow presidents, just think of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Tech companies can't be allowed to mute presidents like they have an on / off switch for power.
The basis of our business that we use their platforms must be that they maintain a neutrality that enables the free exchange of political positions and the debate about these positions.
If they start shutting down unpleasant positions, we have to shut them down.
Because the decision about what reaches the public's ears must not be left to a handful of private companies.
Yes, because the next time someone other than Donald Trump could be banned.
Who is not least a creature of those who now make him the scapegoat for a development that they themselves have promoted and from which they have benefited most.