Pattern Matching
What Happens When a Tech Company Makes an Enemy of the President
Twitter draws a line in the sand, while Facebook ducks and covers
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
From the moment Donald Trump was elected, it was obvious he’d present a conundrum for the social platforms that helped fuel his rise to power. After all, he’d broken into politics partly by pushing the racist conspiracy theory that President Obama had been born in Kenya, and insulted and demonized countless individuals and groups on his path to election.
In late November 2016, I asked both Facebook and Twitter if they’d enforce their rules against a sitting president, hypothetically, assuming he were to violate them. Facebook said it wouldn’t; by definition, anything an elected president might say would qualify as mainstream political discourse, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want to be in the business of regulating that. Twitter, however, wouldn’t rule it out: “The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts, including verified accounts,” a spokesperson said.
Fast-forward three-and-a-half years, and the confrontation everyone expected long ago is finally here. Just as the companies…
