Why Trump and Social media platforms are at loggerheads?

Trump is known for his inconvenience with the national and international news media organisations like CNN, Wall Street Journal, New York times etc. He has been calling them "Fake news factory" for some time. He prefers to communicate directly to his followers and is an avid Twitter user with massive following. So when Twitter started fact-checking his tweets, he lost his cool and threatened to sign executive orders against the social media platforms. 

Trump is not somebody who plays it safe and it was very evident when Twitter chose to Fact-Check one of the president's tweet. Trump threatened the social media companies with an executive order threatening to narrow protections for social platforms that censor speech for ideological reasons.

The war of words escalated when Twitter on Friday remarked on Donald trump's Minneapolis violence tweet as violating Twitter rules and glorifying violence, but choosing to keep the tweet in public's interest.

This fact checking exercise was also undertaken on some Chinese officials who use Twitter, one of them is the official spokesperson of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

This action from Twitter has started a raging debate with people and institutions on either side of the aisle. There are people in favor of this action saying there should be checks and balances for world leaders as they communicate through social media, since most of the time social media comes up as an unregulated platform where there is always some fringe spewing some kind of misinformation and getting away with it. Then there are people on other side of the argument saying a platform cannot become an authority and decide by itself if something needs to be censored or not.

If a for profit social media organisation can censor a public figure who is directly communicating to his followers is a million dollar question that needs a much nuanced deliberation. It also happens to be the reason cited by Donald Trump for him threatening to take legal actions on the social media companies.

Social media platforms realize that they are not dealing with any random disgruntled user who will try to be obnoxious for some time and then will eventually come around. Trump is a powerful, opinionated "President of the United States of America" with a massive following, both on and off social media. In addition he has the government's executive powers at his disposal, to send these platforms for some kind of merry chase, that can make their life somewhat difficult.

Trump's executive order in the garb on protecting free speech is a veiled message to the social media organisations to stay out of his way. He is trying to send a message, implying this stream of brash, free from truth and highly controversial social media posts would continue, in a bid to communicate to his followers directly in an election season and the social media moderators has to deal with it. He is also trying to show "who is the boss" here.

He has achieved some success with his garbed message. Following his threat to social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Fox to say he is uncomfortable playing the "arbiter of truth" in this case, and Facebook would prevent itself from taking down President's posts as those are directly intended for his followers and they eventually should be the judge of the information he processes on our platform. 

However diplomatic Facebook tries to be here, but our experience says in this perception business, the one who backs down does have a hard time keeping it's herd together. In this perception battle Twitter and Donald Trump seems to be winning at this moment while the public at large remains highly polarized.

Conclusion:

When the "President of the United States of America", snubs social media platforms for fact-checking his Tweets, it doesn't look magnanimous. But then Donald Trump doesn't mind playing rough. He is also not going to think twice before speaking his mind. But this should not stop the social media platforms from going ahead with this much needed reform. Sanity has to be restored to social media, specially with people having large following and the ability to shape public perception. No politician should be able to spread misinformation, or act racist, or promote violence via the use of social media without being called out for it. As a society we will have to start somewhere without thinking about who is the first guy we are going to have to bump into.