Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are right to crack down on Trump, but others must follow

Right-wing media outlets have helped establish an alternative reality with their alternative facts. The ugly scenes on Wednesday night are the result, writes James Moore

Social media has come under fire for its role in the storming on of the US capitol by Trump supporters (Reuters)

The backlash against social media against the disgraceful events in Washington DC was swift, fierce and richly deserved.

It played a key role in enabling the ugly scenes that shook the world and left America’s friends and allies aghast as they were played out on Wednesday night.

They were the culmination of Donald Trump’s four years of misrule during which the US was wrapped in a tissues of lies. Boxes of Kleenex were held open by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.

They all have terms and conditions. The taking down of lies, misinformation, hatred and toxicity disseminated by the US president and his facilitators, would not have raised an issue with America’s beloved First Amendment, protecting free speech, because they are private corporations that operate private platforms.

And yet their much vaunted “community standards” are only selectively enforced. The picture of an amputee, nude but posed no more provocatively than you’d see in ad for shower gel running before the watershed, resulted in the Ability Access group getting temporarily blocked from Facebook.

Trump spread misinformation and bile with virtual impunity until the US election results made clear Joe Biden’s victory, and started the countdown to his impending departure. And he will have to depart.

The indefinite block on his posting announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a clear case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Trump was given his platform, of course, because he was money. His posts drew attention and clicks and eyes for advertisers, and thus profits.

Yet while the regulation of social media companies and the responsibilities they have are now once again the subject of welcome debate, it’s too easy to blame just them. Far too easy.

This isn’t just about the lax attitude to incendiary content bordering on incitement from the president and others (plenty of whom reside on this side of the Atlantic) by the lords of social media.

It took more than a few snarky tweets from the crypto-fascist in the White House and his friends to light the fuse that exploded on Wednesday.

To encourage the baseless but widespread belief that the US election was somehow “stolen” – rejected every time it was presented to a court including by Conservative, Trump-appointed judges – didn’t just depend on a social media catalyst.

As the power of the latter was rising so was a hard right-wing ecosystem of “news” sites and channels often trading more in fantasy than in fact.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News led the charge, with its prime time “opinion” hosts nightly stirring a Trumpian pot that, did much to create the alternative reality, often fuelled by Kellyanne Conway’s infamous alternative facts, that Trump supporters live in.

Online watchdogs such as Newshounds or Media Matters for America document its regular outrages.

The problem is that Fox’s shamelessness, even a grotesque scandal involving a string of sexual harassment allegations that ultimately led to the departure of the late Roger Ailes, its former boss, didn’t do much to affect its bottom line. To the contrary.

Fox News Channel has become a phenomenally successful business. Even when advertisers baulked at the outbursts of its opinion hosts, Tucker Carlson saying immigrants made America “dirtier” is a good example, their dollars simply moved to other programmes. They stayed with the channel, and it prospered.

Fox has always cynically claimed to be a news channel, branding itself as a conservative alternative to the allegedly “liberal” mainstream which isn’t liberal at all. That includes having news hosts who do sometimes report facts, which are discomforting for a radicalised audience and the president, such as the network calling Arizona for Biden.

This fuelled the rise of competitors on its rightward flank. And while it’s hard to conceive of Fox having a rightward flank, Newsmax and One America News have proved that it is there, with content produced from even further down the Trumpian rabbit hole.

The work of Fox and its ilk, notably a network of venomously right-wing websites, have created and expanded the appetite for this stuff. So these businesses have emerged to fill and profit from it.

The result is ugly indeed. And something like it may yet be coming to Britain, with the apparent blessing of the government.

There are no easy solutions to this, although some may emerge from the mayhem. It certainly seems to be prompting a degree of reflection on the part of some American conservatives, who are waking up to the fact that the extremists and their media shills aren’t really conservative. They more accurately represent the extreme right. If this leads to the emergence of a conservative counter-weight, and their being pushed to the fringes, then so much the better.

The pushback from business groups, which have at times offered succour to Trump, even if it’s been somewhat tepid, is also welcome. 

A degree more pushback in the face of the outrageous by America’s more reputable news outlets certainly wouldn’t hurt. I watched aghast as NBC news had on an Oklahoma congressman peddling the baseless theory that the violence and vandalism was the work of “agitators” and complained of bad behaviour on “both sides” as if there were an army of Biden supporting yahoos coming at the capitol from the other end of Washington with little in the way of challenge.

Ultimately fighting this will take time, effort, energy and most of all will, because it’s highly profitable and deeply entrenched. But goodness me, the work needs doing.