Should Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world, be banned from Twitter?
Kamala Harris thinks so. Last Tuesday she sent a letter to Twitter’s chief executive arguing that Trump has been violating the platform’s user agreement.
Harris pointed to recent tweets Trump had sent harassing the Ukraine whistleblower and the House intelligence committee chairman, Adam Schiff, as well as Trump’s tweet threatening civil war.
These, Harris said, constitute “blatant threats that put people at risk and our democracy in danger. No user, regardless of their job, wealth, or stature should be exempt from abiding by Twitter’s user agreement, not even the president of the United States,” Harris concluded.
There’s been a lot of outrage about the sanctity of the first amendment following Harris’s call to ban Trump from Twitter.
The Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard, for example, said: “We can’t just cancel or shut down or silence those who we disagree with or who hold different views or who say things even that we strongly disagree with. These freedoms and principles enshrined in our constitution are things we have to take very seriously.”
I completely agree with Gabbard.
Let’s face it folks, banning Trump from Twitter will not silence him.
If Trump was forced off Twitter he could just go on Fox News every day. He could hold more press conferences. Shoot, he could even start his own social network.
Twitter banning Trump would certainly send a message. The question is, which one? While some might see it as a win for accountability, the right would immediately interpret the move as censorship against conservatives and it would probably boost support for the president among his base. It might even help Trump win the election.
Regulators should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable.
The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries. Censorship dominated the lives of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany.
The prime mover in censorship was the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
It was his responsibility to see that the German people were fed with material acceptable to the Nazi state. Newspapers, radio and all forms of media were put under the control of the Nazis.
Even the film and Music industries were controlled by the Nazis.
Music by Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn was banned since they were both Jews. Jazz was also banned.
Even telling jokes about Hitler became a serious offence – one that could send you to the concentration camps and potentially death (think Saturday Night Live).
Censorship was enforced by a number of methods. First, the secret police or the local police ensured that the rules were kept to.
Secondly, anyone who wanted to go outside of the desired party norm faced the most serious of consequences.
Third, people in general were expected to report anything unacceptable to their local party chief. Those who knew something but did not report it were deemed as guilty as those who went against the system. This was key to enforcement.
Censorship ensured that the Nazis had the German public in their grip as they bombarded them on a daily basis on how their lives had been improved from the day Hitler became Germany’s leader.
The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind………the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. The one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a personal policy secures.” Adolf Hitler from “Mein Kampf”
“Our way of taking power and using it would have been inconceivable without the radio and the airplane,” Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels claimed in August 1933.
Such statements are often cited—the head of Disney, Bob Iger, recently said that Adolf Hitler would have loved social media.
Goebbels was not saying that the Nazis had used both new technologies, the airplane and the radio, to come to power. Rather, the airplane helped the Nazis take power. Radio helped them keep it.
The history of radio, and in particular how it was regulated in interwar Germany, is more relevant than ever: Five years ago, the question was whether we would regulate social media. Now the questions are how and when we will regulate them.
As politicians and regulators in places as different as Berlin, Singapore, and Washington and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg consider how best to do so, we should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Radio only became central to Nazi aims after Hitler was elected chancellor in January 1933, but Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already controlled its infrastructure and content.
State control over radio had been intended to defend democracy. It unintentionally laid the groundwork for the Nazi propaganda machine.
Radio emerged as a new technology in the early 1920s, and the bureaucrat tasked with developing regulations for it in the Weimar Republic, Hans Bredow, initially had high hopes.
He thought that radio could broadcast education and entertainment to bring the German population together after the divisive loss of World War I, and believed that radio should not broadcast political content, fearing it might exacerbate an already hostile environment.
Initially, Bredow allowed private companies to broadcast, and only from the mid-1920s on did stations start to air some news.
This seemed dangerous to Bredow and other officials, who worried that news could stoke uprisings or antidemocratic sentiment.
Weimar bureaucrats began exerting ever greater state supervision over radio content to try to depoliticize it. As the Weimar Republic became more and more politically unstable, Bredow and others pushed through reforms in 1926 and 1932 that mandated direct state supervision of radio content.
Bredow believed that increased state direction would prevent Weimar democracy from failing.
Ironically, this effort played right into the Nazis’ hands, and meant that the Nazis could seize immediate control over radio content when they came to power.
Bredow was imprisoned for trying to stand up for democratic values. (After World War II, he helped to reestablish radio in democratic West Germany. There is now even a media institute in Hamburg named after him.)
The Nazi example, though extreme, reminds us that well-intentioned laws can have tragic unintended consequences.
We need to be wary of the long-term consequences of state control over content.
Action is needed. But the actual history of Nazi Germany can help us think more critically about current policy suggestions and move beyond mud-slinging comparisons with the fascist past.
Now let’s turn to another great example of government controlled media. The Soviet Union.
Russian authorities are currently discussing blocking the Telegram messaging app, saying it can be used by terrorists. So let’s look at cases from the past when the Soviet elite banned different information sources.
The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 while championing freedom, yet one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through harsh censorship.
In early November 1917, the Soviet government signed the Decree on Press which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” (affluent, middle class) articles criticizing the Bolsheviks’ authority.
As the years passed political censorship grew stronger, reaching its peak under Joseph Stalin’s reign. After his death the state relaxed its stance but censorship remained until Mikhail Gorbachev declared glasnost in the late 1980s.
Lenin and Stalin claimed Soviet censorship had “a different character than the one existing in bourgeois states and aimed only at protecting the interests of the working class.”
This is a bold statement, especially given the fact the Soviet elite employed censorship for its own bloody gain, most notably during Stalin’s Great Purge.
“The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents was followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence,” British historian David King wrote in his book The Commissar Vanishes.
Retouchers worked hard erasing traces of fallen leaders from all photographs and images.
In 1921, the Soviet government created the Glavlit (General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press) which for decades remained the main instrument of controlling literature. Glavlit’s censors decided if a book was published in the USSR, or if it was banned.
As a result, Soviet citizens could not read many books, some of which are now regarded as classics – including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, not to mention most works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that criticized the Soviet regime.
The circulation of books written by immigrant writers who had fled Soviet Russia were, of course, prohibited.
Nevertheless, the Soviet government wasn’t able to completely eradicate literature it deemed “dangerous.”
Through the ages, people opposing censorship have circulated handmade copies of banned literature. In the Soviet Union, this was called samizdat (self-published) and scores of illegal books were enjoyed by readers as a result.
Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the USSR from 1953 to 1964, was more liberal than Stalin, whose repressive policies he condemned in his secret speech in 1956. According to the Russian historian Leonid Katsva, Khrushchev even thought of abolishing ideological censorship in art, but changed his mind.
Under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964 to 1982) the state continued to oppress artists working outside the realm of social realism. For example, in 1974 the government demolished an unofficial avant-garde exhibition in the suburbs of Moscow using bulldozers and water cannons. The event became known as the “Bulldozer Exhibition.”
Throughout the Cold War both the West and the USSR were trying to influence each other’s population by providing “alternative points of view.”
In 1946, the BBC started broadcasting radio services for Soviet citizens. Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Deutsche Welle all followed suit a couple of years later.
Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin was not happy with Western media trying to meddle with Soviet citizens so it started blocking radio frequencies used by foreign stations.
According to Rimantas Pleikis, a radio journalist from Lithuania, the USSR possessed the most powerful and wide scale “anti-radio” system in the world.
But even that system had cracks. Those who wanted to continue tuning in to the “foreign voices” and alternative opinions – along with jazz and rock music – found a way. Finally, in 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev officially stopped blocking Western radio stations.
Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. “It will never happen here.”
You are dead wrong.
Old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams,” one supporter of challenger Thomas Jefferson called the incumbent president. But Adams got the last laugh, signing a bill in 1798 that made it illegal to criticize a government official without backing up one’s criticisms in court. Twenty-five people were arrested under the law, though Jefferson pardoned its victims after he defeated Adams in the 1800 election.
How about this one.
The bawdy novel “Fanny Hill” (1748), written by John Cleland as an exercise in what he imagined a prostitute’s memoirs might sound like, was no doubt familiar to the Founding Fathers; we know that Benjamin Franklin, who himself wrote some fairly risque material, had a copy.
The book holds the record for being banned longer than any other literary work in the United States–prohibited in 1821, and not legally published until the US Supreme Court overturned the ban in Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966). Of course, once it was legal it lost much of its appeal: by 1966 standards, nothing written in 1748 was liable to shock anybody.
And finally here is one more great example:
During the Civil War, the battle for public opinion was almost as important as the battles fought with bullets and bayonets. President Abraham Lincoln was a master tactician when it came to using public opinion as both a political weapon as well as a military aid.
He used the press not only to get his message out in an era before electronic mass communication, but also to prevent his opponents from having similar access to the hearts and minds of the people. He did this through the use of military censorship, control of the post office and telegraphs, and through the use of patronage (giving certain papers exclusive rights).
At that time, New York City was the media capital of the western world. The big three papers in New York City were the Tribune, the Herald, and the Times.
There were also many other influential newspapers in other parts of the country, including in Washington D.C., Philadelphia and in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, where Lincoln purchased a newspaper printed in German to bolster his electoral chances in that state.
Lincoln used censorship of those journalists and newspapers whose views did not fit with the administration or its prosecution of the war, justifying the practice as being one which saved lives by shortening the war.
Many newspapers that were critical of the Union cause were censored or shut down.
Some editors were jailed for their anti-administration views. Freedom of the press was a casualty of the Civil War, and the real debate is whether or not this was justified under the circumstances of the time.
Lincoln also used the press as a means of getting his message to the people in a era before the ability to speak directly to the masses existed (i.e. at a time before radio and television.)
For example, when emancipation became an issue, Lincoln wrote his famous response to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” editorial, which accused Lincoln of using his abolitionist leanings as the reason for the death of so many young men in the war.
In response, Lincoln famously wrote “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that”.
In mid-August 1861, four newspapers in New York City: the New York Daily News, the Journal of Commerce, Day Book, and Freeman’s Journal were all given indictments by a Grand Jury of the United States Circuit Court for “frequently encouraging the rebels by expressions of sympathy and agreement”.
A series of federal prosecutions of newspapers throughout the northern United States followed. The target was any newspaper that printed expressions of sympathy for Southern causes or criticisms of the Lincoln Administration.
Lincoln was able to effect control of press censorship because in those days, stories were filed by telegraph and Lincoln controlled telegraph usage.
Censorship of news dispatches filed in Washington began in April in 1861, a time when the government assumed control of the telegraph wires to & from from the city.
This type of censorship became necessary because Northern papers quickly found their way into hands of Confederate generals.
When Missouri Radicals complained about General John M. Schofield “muzzling the press” in September 1863, Lincoln responded: “I think when an office in any department finds that a newspaper is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress it.
Drastic measures were sometimes taken where it was seen necessary for military purposes. There were repeated civil and military actions to shut down newspapers for supposedly seditious behavior. This was common early in the war in the border states of Maryland and Missouri.
So folks, don’t believe that it cannot happen here.
Let’s go back to our first question now that you have had a little history lesson.
Should President Trump’s Twitter account be shut down?