“I do not celebrate or feel pride,” the Twitter boss Jack Dorsey said this week after banishing Donald Trump.
But for many around the world the decision brought hope: might similar action soon be taken against other populist provocateurs they accuse of using social media to stir chaos?
“I have to follow YouTube’s rules when I post my videos, or I get banned. Journalists have to obey their outlet’s rules when they publish a story. So why shouldn’t presidents have to obey any rules when they publish something online?” wondered Felipe Neto, one of Brazil’s most famous and politicized online celebrities. “It’s as simple as that.”
From Rio to Delhi, activists and academics have been asking similar questions following the US president’s suspension from platforms including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
Calls for action have been particularly loud in Brazil, which has been led since 2019 by Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right tweeter-in-chief who basks in portrayals as the “tropical Trump”.
“Twitter has put a muzzle on Trump. We’ll need another for Brazil,” tweeted Marcelo Freixo, one of several political rivals urging sanctions.
Critics accuse Bolsonaro of repeatedly using social media to undermine democracy and incite violence. In an incendiary YouTube broadcast on the eve of his 2018 election he promised a historic “cleanup” of “red” rivals. In office, Bolsonaro has refused to moderate, using social media to encourage anti-democratic protests and urge “upstanding” supporters to buy guns to avoid being “enslaved”. In recent months Bolsonaro has questioned Brazil’s electronic voting system, convincing many that if he loses the next election he will reject its results as Trump has done – with unpredictable consequences for a young democracy.
“His obsession with arming the greatest possible number of his followers has an obvious goal,” warned Neto, who has 41m YouTube followers. “Bolsonaro and his family are preparing the ground not to accept election defeat – and things promise to be far worse than in the US [Capitol invasion].”
Pedro Doria, a technology columnist, said he felt uneasy that unelected big tech bosses had the power to silence presidents. But he was also deeply troubled by Bolsonaro’s unchecked use of social media to preach political rupture.
“If Trump was expurged from Twitter because he incited a mob against the Capitol, well, Bolsonaro is preparing himself to do the same … It makes no sense to wait for him to actually act on trying to overthrow the Brazilian democratic regime.”
In India, many have called for similar sanctions against the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and figures from his ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While Modi’s regular use of Twitter is largely anodyne and uncontroversial, numerous senior and mid-level BJP politicians have been accused of politically motivated hate speech on their social media accounts.
Facebook in particular has repeatedly been accused of bias towards the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP by giving a platform to anti-Muslim hate speech by BJP leaders and not taking action against Hindu nationalist groups promoting Muslim lynching and mob violence. Incendiary Facebook posts have been held responsible for several recent outbreaks of communal violence in India which left multiple people dead, as well as the spread of dangerous anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. In September, Facebook banned a BJP politician for violating their hate speech rules, but only after after a Wall Street Journal investigation and huge public pressure.
Shashi Tharoor, a leader from the opposition National Congress party who recently chaired a parliamentary committee examining Facebook’s actions in India, was among those who called for Twitter to take similar steps to curb incitement of violence by India’s ruling politicians. “Curbing the freedom of expression of those who incite violence and other democratic behaviour is needed here too,” Tharoor tweeted. “Those who try to curb the rights and liberties of people who they’re elected to lead shouldn’t be given an enabling platform.”
Others were more explicit about who they felt Twitter should sanction.
Khaled A Beydoun, an associate professor of law at the University of Arkansas School of Law, said suspending Modi from Twitter “would be the logical next move”. Beydoun added: “Authoritarian incitement by the chief executive isn’t only an American phenomenon.”
Trump’s suspension, and the prospect of similar action elsewhere, are not universally welcomed, particularly by allies or those identified as potential targets.
Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, Viktor Orbán, came out firmly in support of Trump ahead of November’s election, and numerous government figures have condemned the US president’s suspension.
Judit Varga, the justice minister, called the decisions “digital imperialism” that showed “how vulnerable we really are to global control of liberal social media”. The editor of the far-right pro-Orbán tabloid Pesti Srácok called Trump’s suspension “Bolshevist censorship”.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson called the suspension “a nuclear blast in cyber space”, warning: “It’s not the destruction that’s scary but the consequences.”
Bolsonaristas have also attacked the moves, with the president’s politician son, Eduardo, decrying Twitter’s “authoritarian acts” and changing his profile photo to one of Trump in protest. Other critics include Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador – who compared the ban to the Spanish Inquisition – and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Nor is it clear social media giants will take such radical action outside the US. Facebook has long drawn criticism for its opaque and seemingly arbitrary enforcement of its rules against violent incitement or hate speech by political leaders.
The company notoriously failed to take action against leaders of the Mynamar military who used the platform to spread disinformation and hate against the Rohingya minority until a year after the campaign of genocide began.
In 2017, it banned Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, not due to his long record of using Instagram to threaten political opponents – including a video depicting a Russian opposition leader in a gun’s crosshairs – but because Kadyrov was placed on a US sanctions list for alleged human rights abuses. Even then, the company refused to explain why Kadyrov was banned while other world leaders on sanctions lists such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad continued to have access to Facebook’s tools.
David Kaye, a law professor and the former UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, said: “The most important question here, in my view, is whether the actions of last week are something the companies are prepared to adopt globally.”
“I imagine that they would say yes, but that’s not enough. They will always be seen as American companies, particularly alive to American context and concerns, unless they devote the same kind of attention and resources that they apply in the United States to content issues around the world.”
Kaye said the decisions to ban Trump required the platforms to look beyond the US president’s individual statements to consider their political context and intended audience. “They need to ramp up their attention to all those places where public figures use the platforms to incite violence, and that means serious increase in staffing and expertise beyond having moderators look at individual pieces of content.”
Doria admitted he was uncertain what the right course of action was in Brazil but believed one critical question needed, asking: “What are social media waiting for?
“Bolsonaro is doing exactly what Trump did, which is preparing to claim fraud if he loses. He will try to incite a mob and overthrow the [democratic] regime,” he predicted.
“And social media will be complicit if that happens in Brazil after Trump actually did this. They won’t be able to hide behind the argument: ‘Well, we couldn’t imagine.’”