Trump's Twitter war aims to unite divided conservatives

President Donald Trump has given divided conservatives a path to take on social media giants — whether they agree with it or not.

For years, conservatives have debated how best to rein in the power and perceived liberal bias of Twitter, Facebook, Google and other tech companies that have become central to American discourse. Some pushed for regulations they argued would police the heavyweights and better protect free speech, privacy and civil liberties. Others advocated for negotiations with corporate leaders. Another cadre debated what political tactics might help accomplish their goals.

Then last week, Trump injected himself into the debate with an executive order threatening to crack down on social media companies. While the move had policy elements, it was largely a political play. And that’s a battle some disgruntled conservatives say they’re more likely to win, even if not everyone thinks it's the right approach.

“There’s other people who are focused on policy, but Trump is not a policy person, he’s a political animal,” said Rachel Bovard, senior adviser at the Internet Accountability Project, a right-leaning advocacy group focused on regulating technology companies.

Indeed, in just a matter of days, Trump has turned his Twitter feed into a battleground between him and Silicon Valley, particularly against Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who recently ceded to calls to moderate Trump’s social media content.

Officially, the White House published an executive order aiming to remove the legal protections that technology companies have for publishing and moderating their own content. And unofficially, Trump has continued to type out tweets that are getting flagged for misinformation or promoting violence — which, depending on the point of view, is either Twitter enforcing its own code of conduct or Twitter revealing its liberal bias by silencing the president.

While not all conservatives have lined up behind Trump's tactics — with some even vocally opposing the executive order — it has still given many of them a potentially power a battle cry. And either way, said Will Chamberlain, editor-in-chief of the conservative online publication Human Events, Trump has stumbled onto a vein of conservative discontent.

“I don’t think it’s weird that the president himself would kind of brush off social media [policy] until he realized the power that they had, because they were willing to edit his tweets,” said Chamberlain, who articulated in 2019 the administration’s novel legal interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a part of the law protecting online sites from being held liable for content posted on their platforms.

Starting last week, Twitter began adding notes to Trump’s tweets, spelling out how they’d violated the platform’s terms of service — for instance, that his threat to send the National Guard to shoot protesters in Minneapolis last Friday was “glorifying violence” — while leaving them up because they were in the public interest. To the platform, the move was drawing a line on the content they deemed unacceptable on their private platform. To conservatives, it read as an attempt to recontextualize Trump’s speech in a negative light.

Though the conservative movement has long worried about how private companies like Twitter and Facebook could potentially work against their cause by moderating content, they’ve been divided on exactly how to to deal with it. Among libertarian-inclined conservatives, the idea of using government to dictate how a private company should operate was anathema to free enterprise. People like Chamberlain, in contrast, worked under the assumption that at this point, the market could not create a viable, conservative-friendly competitor to Facebook or Twitter.

As a hypothetical, he floated a scenario in which Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire funder of the far-right Breitbart News, bought Twitter, speculating that suddenly progressives and far-left activists would start finding themselves locked out.

“If you try to set up a competitor,” Chamberlain said, “Mercer would either buy it out, or essentially use this competitive power to flex on them and keep anybody from going [into] the marketplace. How long would liberals tolerate that?”

As a result, Chamberlain argued, a small handful of dominant, privately owned social media companies hold a monopoly on public speech, citing right wingers’ failed attempts to create alternative social media sites outside of Twitter and Facebook — the platforms that helped spawn modern conservatism and the MAGA movement.

He noted that several prominent MAGA influencers who built their followings through social media — Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, Infowars’ Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, for instance — saw their careers suffer after being kicked off social media. Chamberlain said he frequently worried about what would happen if he were next.

“What I do is completely reliant on my ability to access Twitter,” Chamberlain said. “And I don’t think they should have that power. I don’t think they should have the power to deprive me of my livelihood.”

Furthermore, Brovard said, conservatives who’d engaged with this issue for years had bigger concerns.

“I think what conservatives are concerned about is the computing power of these companies, over not just speech but privacy data, market access behavior elections, take your pick,” she said. “These companies have essentially become for the public square and a lot of these questions.”

Both Republicans and Democrats concur that Section 230 should be reviewed, albeit for different reasons: Broadly speaking, conservatives are focused on issues of free speech, while liberals seek to hold platforms accountable for spreading misinformation, particularly after the 2016 election.

“There is an acknowledgement on behalf of these companies that they have massive power over speech and behavior,” Bovard said, “and when this threatens elections, when this threatens the speech of public officials, that’s a public policy concern.”

Legal experts are in agreement that, technically, there isn’t much Trump’s executive order can immediately do regarding social media policy: Changing Section 230 would require Congress to pass a law amending the language, a prospect that is highly unlikely at the moment.

But outside the realm of lawmaking, Twitter’s new rules — and Trump’s ongoing Twitter habits — have set up a massive game of political chicken between the president and the social media giant. It’s a game that conservatives say is more politically favorable to them than trying to advance major policy changes.

Trump and his allies have long engaged with the online conservative community for years, elevating claims that Big Tech is suppressing conservative speech, either through covert methods like manipulating the algorithms that determined the content on people’s feeds, or through public actions like kicking people off their platforms. Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, for instance, have sponsored legislation to scrutinize tech companies’ terms of use and whether they subtly target political speech, particularly conservative speech.

Joan Donovan, the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, pointed specifically to the White House’s social media summit last year, which hosted dozens of online MAGA personalities who claimed they were being silenced on these platforms.

“In some way, it’s a reflection of the fact that he knows that this alternative media ecosystem is really important for his election strategy for his campaign,” Donovan said.

Bovard acknowledged that weaponizing Section 230 for political purposes could be ultimately dangerous for conservatives, and that it could be “misused at the hands of political actors to quell speech they don’t agree with, and as a policy matter, we shouldn’t want that.”

That said, she contended that Big Tech was fundamentally misunderstanding the terrain of this battlefield.

“I think part of the reason we’re here goes back to the arrogance of these tech companies,” she said. “They think they're above the law, they think the law doesn't apply to them. They think members of Congress are stupid. That’s part of the reason we’re seeing a backlash, is because they have just treated members’ concerns like crap, and hew to Section 230 like it’s their constitutional right. And it’s not.”

Donovan said the platforms had brought some of this attention on themselves. She recalled that back in the early days of social media — and around the time of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 — Facebook and Twitter marketed themselves as platforms of revolution, where social movements could organize and mobilize and hopefully change the world.

But now Twitter is playing with fire, she added, given that right-wing media survives through social media, and the movement is heavily invested in maintaining their bullhorn to the masses.

“Their content and their audiences are on social media,” she said. “And so to start to rein in platforms at this moment — is this a bluff?”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Rachel Bovard's name.