In Pulling Trump’s Megaphone, Twitter Shows Where Power Now Lies

In the end, two billionaires from California did what legions of politicians, prosecutors and power brokers had tried and failed to do for years: They pulled the plug on President Donald Trump. Permanently suspending Trump's accounts was a watershed moment in the history of social media. Facebook and Twitter had spent years defending Trump’s continued presence on their platforms, only to change course days before the end of his presidency. These companies, corporate autocracies masquerading as mini-democracies, often portray their moderation decisions as the results of a kind of formulaic due process, as if “don’t incite an insurrectionist mob” had been in the community guidelines all along. But high-stakes calls like these typically come down to gut decisions made under extreme duress. In this case, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg considered the evidence, consulted their teams, weighed the trade-offs and risks of inaction — including the threat of a worker revolt that could damage their ability to attract top talent — and decided that they’d seen enough. Journalists and historians will spend years unpacking the improvisational nature of these bans, and scrutinizing why they arrived just as President Trump was losing his power, and Democrats were poised to take control of Congress and the White House. The bans have also turned up the heat on a free-speech debate that has been simmering for years.