Problem
Should the President Be Active on Social Media?
A year following his election to the White House, real estate developer and former reality television host Donald Trump credited his use of social media, and Twitter in particular, for getting him elected. The president told Maria Bartiromo at Fox Business Network, "I doubt I would be here if it weren't for social media, to be honest with you."37 Trump said he liked using Twitter because he could respond immediately and directly to his critics: "So when somebody says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing, and I take care of it. The other way I would never get the word out."38
Communications professor David Gerzof Richard says President Trump has made a major transformation, going to social media rather than news media to get his messages out. "President Trump uses the platform to tell his story, his way," he said. "There is no editorial board, no fact checkers, no advisers, not filters-just a direct conduit to tens of millions of followers."39
Trump's effective use of Twitter harkens back to the work of Canadian economist and media theorist Harold Innis who wrote in the 1950s that new media that are biased toward rapid distribution of information rather than lasting a long time will tend to upset the social order.40 (You can read more about Innis and his ideas back in Chapter 4.)
President Trump's most popular tweet of 2017 was of a video from 2007 that had Trump body slamming someone at WWE's WrestleMania. The video had been altered so that the man Trump slammed had his head replaced with a CNN logo. The tweet was discussed on the Sunday morning talk shows, and so it got amplification from the legacy media.
His second most popular tweet was part of an exchange of insults between the president and the head of North Korea. President Trump wrote, "Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me 'old,' when I would NEVER call him 'short and fat?' Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend-and maybe someday that will happen!"41
The president's use of a social media channel to handle much of his public communication has been controversial at a number of levels. In addition to his reputation for saying anything he wants to on social media, President Trump has had a history of blocking people who are critical of him. That means that not only does he not see what his critics post, but his critics can't see or comment on his posts.
In May 2018, federal district court judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that President Trump's Twitter feed is a public forum, and so therefore he cannot block people from seeing or interacting with it. Judge Buchwald had previously suggested that if the president or other politicians did not want to see what critics were saying, they could "mute" them. Muting controls what the president would see but not what his followers would see.42 This has First Amendment implications because presidential tweets are likely official government communication that must be freely available to everyone.
Social media channels have attracted criticism for giving powerful politicians like President Trump special treatment. Facebook, for example, has an official policy of not correcting politicians who put up deceptive content on their pages. "It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak," said Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs. "We do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules."43 Facebook has had a controversial fact-checking system in place since 2016, but there have been complaints about who the fact-checkers are and that Facebook will sometimes yield to political pressure on controversial topics.
The conflict came to the forefront when President Trump put a post on both Facebook and Twitter during the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in late May 2020 that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." President Trump said he was unaware of the phrase's racist history, but he kept the comment posted. Facebook did nothing with the post.44 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had his company put a warning label on a tweet with the same text but did not take the post down.45 Earlier that month, Twitter added a fact-checking label to a tweet from the president that advanced an unsupported conspiracy theory that MSNBC morning news host Joe Scarborough had murdered a young woman in his office more than two decades ago. In response to Twitter's action, the president signed an executive order that attempts to take away protections from social media channels that they get under the Communications Decency Act of 1996.46
Regardless of your opinion of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or of your political affiliation, consider the use of Twitter by a politician as addressed in the case study. First, Should presidents be able to block people on Twitter? Why or why not? Why is it different from you blocking someone you don't like? Secondly, in your opinion, do you think the president and other prominent politicians be allowed to violate rules that everyone else has to follow? Why or why not?