Donald Trump vs. Big Tech: If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Raise Money Off of ’Em
For now, the banishment appears to have cooled some of the inflammatory falsehoods. Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73% after the mass suspension, a study by Zignal Labs found.
The San Francisco-based analytics firm also reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.
Efforts such as Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, along with kooky extremists such as the QAnon folks, undermine the credibility of free elections, the keystone of our democracy.
The challenge for our democracy is to create and maintain a public square in which bad speech can be countered with good speech. Unfortunately, the inexact art of screening zillions of social media messages every day and night for dangerous words and images too often overdoes its job, and perfectly innocent messages get swept up in the process.
That’s a customer relations problem for Facebook and the other tech giants to work out. The future of their business model hangs in the balance, perhaps along with the future of our democracy. We already may be slipping into the nightmare of infotainment that educator Neil Postman warned about in his prophetic 1985 classic, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
Meanwhile, fundraising emails for Trump’s court fight went out immediately after its filing, indicating once again that no crisis in politics is too great for somebody to make a buck from it.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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