Kara Swisher on Trump’s Continuing Exile From Facebook

Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times:

In general, I have considered the case of Mr. Trump to be much less complex than people seem to think. And it has been made to appear highly complicated by big tech companies like Facebook because they want to exhaust us all in a noisy and intractable debate.

Mr. Trump should be seen as an outlier — a lone, longtime rule breaker who was coddled and protected on social media platforms until he wandered into seditious territory. He’s an unrepentant gamer of Facebook’s badly enforced rules who will never change. He got away with it for years and spread myriad self-serving lies far and wide. […]

In moving the key decision over Mr. Trump out of its own hands (where it belonged), the company has passed along the hottest of potatoes and said good riddance to responsibility. Facebook is pretending that its hands are tied, even though Facebook executives were the ones who tied them.

I, for one, would never have bet that Jack Dorsey would be the one who finally dealt with Trump’s abuse decisively, and that Mark Zuckerberg would be the one who looks utterly feckless. I think Zuckerberg was hoping that Trump would just fade from relevancy once he was out of office. That clearly hasn’t happened, and it’s not going to happen over the next six months, either. Zuckerberg needs to make a decision now.

★ Friday, 7 May 2021