I was going to comment something snappy about twitter knowing there's an issue and not caring, but had a thought half-way through the gag: Trump's bad tweets, or anybody's that is in a position of...
I was going to comment something snappy about twitter knowing there's an issue and not caring, but had a thought half-way through the gag:
Trump's bad tweets, or anybody's that is in a position of power, are a matter of national and international interest. I think Twitter's doing an okay job of blocking the standard modes of interaction with the tweets while preserving it and indicating that it violates ToS. The test of "if I post this will I get banned?" is an interesting exercise, but the main variable that changes is the bot is not a national leader. If tweets can be held in the Library of Congress, they can be preserved as monuments to the foibles of world leaders.
There's also the issue of the seeming double standard, but more people have their eyes on Trump than, say, the Ayatollah of Iran, so his stuff is going to be the content that gets slammed first. Ideally it would be consistent for all high-profile individuals who run their fingers like this.
I disagree vehemently. There should be large colored letters that are much more visible than the message itself that point out the falsehoods and fact checks. There should be pinned warnings on...
I think Twitter's doing an okay job of blocking the standard modes of interaction with the tweets while preserving it and indicating that it violates ToS.
I disagree vehemently. There should be large colored letters that are much more visible than the message itself that point out the falsehoods and fact checks.
There should be pinned warnings on the profiles of public figures that regularly spout nonsense.
There should be 18+ limits for accounts accessing that content.
You should be required to log in to see the flagged tweets.
Twitter should have overview pages of all tagged tweets they've had to amend from public figures.
Twitter should push tweets requiring click-through to anyone who were following tweets they've amended that show the next time they log onto twitter telling them of all falsehoods made.
That would be responsible disclosure.
Like newspapers, the corrections to glaringly wrong headlines on the front page can't be unnoticeable retractions hidden away on page 57 days later. To me that's more of an equivalent to what twitter is sometimes and selectively doing now.
Sounds reasonable to me. Strongly disagree. As someone who does not want to have an account on any social media site, and as a citizen of the US, I have a right to know what our leader is saying...
There should be large colored letters that are much more visible than the message itself that point out the falsehoods and fact checks.
There should be pinned warnings on the profiles of public figures that regularly spout nonsense.
There should be 18+ limits for accounts accessing that content.
Sounds reasonable to me.
You should be required to log in to see the flagged tweets.
Strongly disagree. As someone who does not want to have an account on any social media site, and as a citizen of the US, I have a right to know what our leader is saying without having to be forced to consent to tracking by a private company.
Twitter should have overview pages of all tagged tweets they've had to amend from public figures.
Twitter should push tweets requiring click-through to anyone who were following tweets they've amended that show the next time they log onto twitter telling them of all falsehoods made.
Also good ideas!
Like newspapers, the corrections to glaringly wrong headlines on the front page can't be unnoticeable retractions hidden away on page 57 days later.
But Twitter didn't make the incorrect statement. I don't think they should be required to do anything like that, though they're free to do it if they want to. I think it's completely different from a newspaper because the person writing the tweets is not a journalist employed by Twitter.
That's on Trump for picking a private company for his messages, not an issue for Twitter to treat those messages responsibly. If Obama were to write an op-ed in The New York Times, NYT could...
[Requiring an account to see the flagged messages]
Strongly disagree. As someone who does not want to have an account on any social media site, and as a citizen of the US, I have a right to know what our leader is saying without having to be forced to consent to tracking by a private company.
That's on Trump for picking a private company for his messages, not an issue for Twitter to treat those messages responsibly.
If Obama were to write an op-ed in The New York Times, NYT could choose to paywall said piece. That's on Obama, not NYT.
But Twitter didn't make the incorrect statement. I don't think they should be required to do anything like that
Whenever you quote someone, the medium is responsible for giving that quote context. That's their moral responsibility as the hosting platform. Otherwise they're just a microphone stand for whomever saying whatever, however damaging.
It goes for media, it goes for radio, it goes for social media and anyone hosting any content produced by anyone else.
There's a large amount of people who have huge economic reasons for arguing that their platform is just "dumb pipes" to avoid taking responsibility for their platform because that'd cost time/money, while they want all the revenue from said dumb pipes and levels of monetization that edited platforms have. I don't think they should be able to get that both ways, ethically speaking.
If you're a microphone stand for someone who says grossly dangerous things, like a moral duty to kill anyone who eats spaghetti, surely you have to bear responsibility for amplifying that message, right?
If I allow someone to say something grossly misleading on my platform, to avoid my platform misleading people, I need to clearly state that it's wrong and make that fact accessible if I publish and then correct later rather than hold off on publishing until I can give adequate context. Wouldn't you agree?
It might be on Trump, but it doesn't change the fact that this policy would force a person to join Twitter to see what the president is saying. And the comparison to a NYT paywall isn't very good,...
That's on Trump for picking a private company for his messages, not an issue for Twitter to treat those messages responsibly.
It might be on Trump, but it doesn't change the fact that this policy would force a person to join Twitter to see what the president is saying. And the comparison to a NYT paywall isn't very good, as the NYT doesn't track what I do after I buy the paper from the newsstand.
Former President Obama or still-in-office President Obama? If he's still in-office, I'd expect the paper to make it available for free on their website. I'm not saying they would, but it seems to...
If Obama were to write an op-ed in The New York Times, NYT could choose to paywall said piece. That's on Obama, not NYT.
Former President Obama or still-in-office President Obama? If he's still in-office, I'd expect the paper to make it available for free on their website. I'm not saying they would, but it seems to me like they should.
Whenever you quote someone, the medium is responsible for giving that quote context. That's their moral responsibility as the hosting platform. Otherwise they're just a microphone stand for whomever saying whatever, however damaging.
It seems to me that the context is pretty obvious when you open Twitter and go to @whoever that you're on "whoever's" page and what is being said is the thoughts of the person saying it and not something being said by Twitter. It's not being reported on or quoted. It's the person directly saying it.
Plus, plenty of media organizations will run things that are handed to them without giving the viewer any qualification about where it came from or doing any sort of editing. I used to write press releases for a company I ran, and I would send them to news outlets who would often print them verbatim as if they were news stories. I'm not saying it's right for them to handle press releases this way, but it's very common, and there's no legal obligation to do it differently, even if you think there may be a moral one.
If I allow someone to say something grossly misleading on my platform, to avoid my platform misleading people, I need to clearly state that it's wrong and make that fact accessible if I publish and then correct later rather than hold off on publishing until I can give adequate context. Wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think it depends a lot on context and I think Twitter's context is well-known enough. Newspapers don't have to offer corrections to misinformation in classified ads because everyone knows the context of classified ads is different than the context of editorials or reporting. Likewise, everyone knows that what's posted on Twitter is also not reporting.
I think it would be great for them to do that (and I like that they are doing the things they've recently started doing and I like your other suggestions), but I don't think they have any obligation to do so. They aren't the news and they aren't reporting on things. A book store doesn't need to ensure that every sentence of every non-fiction book they sell is true and correct and up-to-date, and they don't need to put warnings on their crappy self-help and bogus medical books (though I sometimes wish they would). I don't see this as any different. Twitter is a forum for randos on the Internet to post whatever's on their mind. That's been pretty well established.
That's a tricky road to go down, making it an official policy to enforce rules differently for public figures, in the interest of letting them expose their unsavory qualities and views. Not only...
That's a tricky road to go down, making it an official policy to enforce rules differently for public figures, in the interest of letting them expose their unsavory qualities and views. Not only are you sending an unfortunate signal that if you are powerful enough, the rules do not apply to you in the same way they apply to other people, but you have to question whether it's actually having the intended effect. If we assume that Twitter instituted a rule like "do not glorify violence" out of a good-faith belief that their platform should not be used to spread such messages, and not just to cover their own ass, you have to ask whether putting a warning on his tweets instead of hiding them completely or suspending the account actually has a net positive effect in curbing the spread of such ideologies.
Trump has spent his entire presidency sowing doubt about mainstream, legitimate media, with the effect that a significant portion of the population trusts his twitter more than something like the New York Times, which performs actual fact-checking on their reporting. Will putting a fact-check warning or a notice that a tweet is in violation of ToS do anything but fuel the persecution narrative that he's pushing? How many people who were inclined to agree with Trump's statements or "facts" actually changed their opinion based on a warning Twitter put up, versus how many simply strengthened their support for him based on the perceived persecution by "MSM" or "social media cucks" or whatever they consider Twitter to be? If your goal is to limit the spread of hateful propaganda on your platform, is it more effective, in practice, to allow it to stay up with a warning and a link to an opposing view, or is it more effective to shut it down entirely?
I don't know the answer, but my suspicion is the latter.
There's also the issue of the seeming double standard, but more people have their eyes on Trump than, say, the Ayatollah of Iran, so his stuff is going to be the content that gets slammed first. Ideally it would be consistent for all high-profile individuals who run their fingers like this.
This I agree with. Whatever the policy, it should also apply to other world leaders and high-profile individuals. I don't think it's controversial to say that Trump is the most powerful and influential user on Twitter, so starting with him seems like a good idea, but it shouldn't end with him.
That's already Twitter's explicit policy: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-interest That's why this Mashable article (and the "experiment") isn't particularly enlightening....
That's a tricky road to go down, making it an official policy to enforce rules differently for public figures, in the interest of letting them expose their unsavory qualities and views.
At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content—Tweets from elected and government officials—given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements.
As a result, in rare instances, we may choose to leave up a Tweet from an elected or government official that would otherwise be taken down. Instead we will place it behind a notice providing context about the rule violation that allows people to click through to see the Tweet.
That's why this Mashable article (and the "experiment") isn't particularly enlightening. Twitter has made it very clear that they treat public figures differently from regular users, and did exactly what their policy says they will in the case of a rule-breaking tweet from one.
Well, it seems appropriate to discuss the consequences and justification of such a policy, then, doesn't it? The same policy page you quoted also says that they are highly unlikely to make that...
Well, it seems appropriate to discuss the consequences and justification of such a policy, then, doesn't it?
The same policy page you quoted also says that they are highly unlikely to make that particular exception in the case of glorification of violence. They did so anyway. Why? This is a fine example of how tricky it can be to actually enforce such a policy. Was it because "there is a more attenuated connection to actual violence"? Seems unlikely, the man is talking about shooting people. Was it because "Twitter is the only source of the information", the other context in which, according to their guidelines, they would possibly make an exception? They didn't censor the earlier tweet where Trump threatens to send in the National Guard, which was actually newsworthy, whereas the only newsworthy part of the tweet that did get slapped with a warning was that Trump had spoken to Tim Walz and told him "the military is with you all the way". Which is not substantially different from what he'd said earlier in a non-censored tweet, the only really novel bit is that he'd personally delivered the message to the governor. So then you have to weigh the newsworthiness of that tidbit of information, versus the clear conviction that the rest of the tweet glorifies violence and is therefore potentially harmful.
To me, that whole dilemma seems a bit absurd. It could have been avoided by a simple blanket ban on glorifying violence. Let Trump announce which governors he's had phone calls with without the added violent rhetoric. I struggle to see a scenario in which any information that is in the public interest to know would be lost.
Of course, and a lot of people have accused Twitter of creating that policy specifically so that they would have an excuse for not acting on Trump's tweets. They finally took some actions on some...
Of course, and a lot of people have accused Twitter of creating that policy specifically so that they would have an excuse for not acting on Trump's tweets. They finally took some actions on some of his recent tweets, but these certainly haven't been the first ones that people thought they should have done something about.
Personally, I think the fundamental mistake almost everyone keeps making is assuming that these sites' policies mean anything at all. They have no obligation to follow them, nobody officially evaluates whether they're doing it well, and there's no punishment for not doing so. They're happy to twist the wording of their policies around to justify any action or inaction, and they've repeatedly rewritten or added new policies to retroactively justify past decisions. The reality is that the platforms just do whatever they want, and then use their policies to make it seem like they had no choice.
Episode #148 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast is an interview with Jack Dorsey where he explains the rationale for keeping Trump on Twitter. It's not a fully satisfying answer (IMO the real...
Episode #148 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast is an interview with Jack Dorsey where he explains the rationale for keeping Trump on Twitter.
It's not a fully satisfying answer (IMO the real reason is the amount of money Trump brings to Twitter, but I'm a cynic), but you might find it worthwhile to hear Jack's perspective.
He would either go through the official White House twitter, or find some other way to get his message out. If we can keep him speaking loudly and obviously, platforms can at least control how...
Do you think Trump would be silenced if he lost his Twitter account, and that the nation would be worse off for it?
He would either go through the official White House twitter, or find some other way to get his message out. If we can keep him speaking loudly and obviously, platforms can at least control how people interact with his message by blocking retweets and shares, like they're currently doing.
If they banned him, then the Tweets wouldn't exist, and thus couldn't be a matter of national and international interest. If we take this to the extreme cases (which basically already happen),...
Trump's bad tweets, or anybody's that is in a position of power, are a matter of national and international interest.
If they banned him, then the Tweets wouldn't exist, and thus couldn't be a matter of national and international interest.
If we take this to the extreme cases (which basically already happen), Twitter would allow genocidal authoritarians to publish on their platform calls for genocide, because those tweets would be very interesting. That sounds kind of fucked up doesn't it, when the alternative is to not allow anybody to call for genocide on your platform?
I'm not sure if this will scan, but is this a plausible scenario given your premise...
A dictator, General Z, begins publishing calls for violence against a minority, and the international community see this and goes "boy he does seem serious about murdering people, and a lot of his constituents are 'liking' the tweets. I'm sure glad we have Twitter here to show us what a murderous dictator General Z is. It will be interesting to see where this goes."
General Z continues to publish on Twitter, to very high levels of both negative and positive engagement. His supporters appear to be rallying to his calls for violence. Twitter continues to host his messaging, as these calls for violence continue to be very interesting internationally.
On some Friday evening, the violence General Z has repeatedly called for breaks out and many people in the targeted minority group are murdered. The international community are appalled. Twitter cops flak for their role in amplifying the dictator's messaging, but retorts to leaders of the international community, "why didn't you do something about what you saw on our platform?".
Applying this idea to something else: If we stop testing, we don't get new coronavirus cases. He's going to think this, and he's going to find a way to broadcast it. By leaving an avenue...
If they banned him, then the Tweets wouldn't exist, and thus couldn't be a matter of national and international interest.
Applying this idea to something else: If we stop testing, we don't get new coronavirus cases.
He's going to think this, and he's going to find a way to broadcast it. By leaving an avenue available, but controlling the spread of the message, you can effectively control the power of the message. He's going to broadcast this stuff. Twitter got wise and started blocking how it spreads, limiting it to direct links and screenshots of the original tweet to limit its utility in encouraging violence.
That's not applying the same idea at all. The same idea in your chosen context would be this: "If we stop testing, we wouldn't have tests conducted or their results recorded." I was clear in...
Applying this idea to something else: If we stop testing, we don't get new coronavirus cases.
That's not applying the same idea at all. The same idea in your chosen context would be this: "If we stop testing, we wouldn't have tests conducted or their results recorded."
I was clear in saying the "Tweets" wouldn't exist, not that Trump's white supremacy wouldn't exist.
Blocking the tweets is like not getting results: Kicking the evidence under the rug doesn't mean the thing didn't happen, and it makes it worse when it explodes. We have the benefit of being able...
Blocking the tweets is like not getting results: Kicking the evidence under the rug doesn't mean the thing didn't happen, and it makes it worse when it explodes.
We have the benefit of being able to see Trump for precisely what he is, because he's so loud about it. We didn't have that benefit with Nixon or Reagan, to name a couple of examples of presidents who were found to be profoundly racist for their times. They did a massive amount of damage to people of color. The harm they did wasn't revealed, and their racism, wasn't revealed until long after their deaths.
By and large, the biggest issue is that Twitter and the other platforms didn't stop him from the beginning. I agree that this is regrettable. We can't close it back up again without trying to cover up a significant part of recent history. However, the justification for many of Trump's policies and action are revealed on his private social media accounts. A lot of his worst decisions are laid bare, as well as his entire ideology. Not having this available would simply drive the hate underground. He and his team would get more creative, and it would be easier for him to get away with it.
Unfortunately, I think something of a double standard is useful to the global community. A racist US president has a huge effect on the rest of the world. A horrible world leader in any country has global implications. We just pulled out of the WHO for a whole host of reasons are likely evident by checking our unstable president's twitter, among other sources. Outright removing the worst behavior from world leaders, when this information should be preserved in the public record, does more to protect bad leaders than it does to protect any country's citizens.
I was going to comment something snappy about twitter knowing there's an issue and not caring, but had a thought half-way through the gag:
Trump's bad tweets, or anybody's that is in a position of power, are a matter of national and international interest. I think Twitter's doing an okay job of blocking the standard modes of interaction with the tweets while preserving it and indicating that it violates ToS. The test of "if I post this will I get banned?" is an interesting exercise, but the main variable that changes is the bot is not a national leader. If tweets can be held in the Library of Congress, they can be preserved as monuments to the foibles of world leaders.
There's also the issue of the seeming double standard, but more people have their eyes on Trump than, say, the Ayatollah of Iran, so his stuff is going to be the content that gets slammed first. Ideally it would be consistent for all high-profile individuals who run their fingers like this.
I disagree vehemently. There should be large colored letters that are much more visible than the message itself that point out the falsehoods and fact checks.
That would be responsible disclosure.
Like newspapers, the corrections to glaringly wrong headlines on the front page can't be unnoticeable retractions hidden away on page 57 days later. To me that's more of an equivalent to what twitter is sometimes and selectively doing now.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Strongly disagree. As someone who does not want to have an account on any social media site, and as a citizen of the US, I have a right to know what our leader is saying without having to be forced to consent to tracking by a private company.
Also good ideas!
But Twitter didn't make the incorrect statement. I don't think they should be required to do anything like that, though they're free to do it if they want to. I think it's completely different from a newspaper because the person writing the tweets is not a journalist employed by Twitter.
That's on Trump for picking a private company for his messages, not an issue for Twitter to treat those messages responsibly.
If Obama were to write an op-ed in The New York Times, NYT could choose to paywall said piece. That's on Obama, not NYT.
Whenever you quote someone, the medium is responsible for giving that quote context. That's their moral responsibility as the hosting platform. Otherwise they're just a microphone stand for whomever saying whatever, however damaging.
It goes for media, it goes for radio, it goes for social media and anyone hosting any content produced by anyone else.
There's a large amount of people who have huge economic reasons for arguing that their platform is just "dumb pipes" to avoid taking responsibility for their platform because that'd cost time/money, while they want all the revenue from said dumb pipes and levels of monetization that edited platforms have. I don't think they should be able to get that both ways, ethically speaking.
If you're a microphone stand for someone who says grossly dangerous things, like a moral duty to kill anyone who eats spaghetti, surely you have to bear responsibility for amplifying that message, right?
If I allow someone to say something grossly misleading on my platform, to avoid my platform misleading people, I need to clearly state that it's wrong and make that fact accessible if I publish and then correct later rather than hold off on publishing until I can give adequate context. Wouldn't you agree?
It might be on Trump, but it doesn't change the fact that this policy would force a person to join Twitter to see what the president is saying. And the comparison to a NYT paywall isn't very good, as the NYT doesn't track what I do after I buy the paper from the newsstand.
Former President Obama or still-in-office President Obama? If he's still in-office, I'd expect the paper to make it available for free on their website. I'm not saying they would, but it seems to me like they should.
It seems to me that the context is pretty obvious when you open Twitter and go to @whoever that you're on "whoever's" page and what is being said is the thoughts of the person saying it and not something being said by Twitter. It's not being reported on or quoted. It's the person directly saying it.
Plus, plenty of media organizations will run things that are handed to them without giving the viewer any qualification about where it came from or doing any sort of editing. I used to write press releases for a company I ran, and I would send them to news outlets who would often print them verbatim as if they were news stories. I'm not saying it's right for them to handle press releases this way, but it's very common, and there's no legal obligation to do it differently, even if you think there may be a moral one.
No, I wouldn't. I think it depends a lot on context and I think Twitter's context is well-known enough. Newspapers don't have to offer corrections to misinformation in classified ads because everyone knows the context of classified ads is different than the context of editorials or reporting. Likewise, everyone knows that what's posted on Twitter is also not reporting.
I think it would be great for them to do that (and I like that they are doing the things they've recently started doing and I like your other suggestions), but I don't think they have any obligation to do so. They aren't the news and they aren't reporting on things. A book store doesn't need to ensure that every sentence of every non-fiction book they sell is true and correct and up-to-date, and they don't need to put warnings on their crappy self-help and bogus medical books (though I sometimes wish they would). I don't see this as any different. Twitter is a forum for randos on the Internet to post whatever's on their mind. That's been pretty well established.
That's a tricky road to go down, making it an official policy to enforce rules differently for public figures, in the interest of letting them expose their unsavory qualities and views. Not only are you sending an unfortunate signal that if you are powerful enough, the rules do not apply to you in the same way they apply to other people, but you have to question whether it's actually having the intended effect. If we assume that Twitter instituted a rule like "do not glorify violence" out of a good-faith belief that their platform should not be used to spread such messages, and not just to cover their own ass, you have to ask whether putting a warning on his tweets instead of hiding them completely or suspending the account actually has a net positive effect in curbing the spread of such ideologies.
Trump has spent his entire presidency sowing doubt about mainstream, legitimate media, with the effect that a significant portion of the population trusts his twitter more than something like the New York Times, which performs actual fact-checking on their reporting. Will putting a fact-check warning or a notice that a tweet is in violation of ToS do anything but fuel the persecution narrative that he's pushing? How many people who were inclined to agree with Trump's statements or "facts" actually changed their opinion based on a warning Twitter put up, versus how many simply strengthened their support for him based on the perceived persecution by "MSM" or "social media cucks" or whatever they consider Twitter to be? If your goal is to limit the spread of hateful propaganda on your platform, is it more effective, in practice, to allow it to stay up with a warning and a link to an opposing view, or is it more effective to shut it down entirely?
I don't know the answer, but my suspicion is the latter.
This I agree with. Whatever the policy, it should also apply to other world leaders and high-profile individuals. I don't think it's controversial to say that Trump is the most powerful and influential user on Twitter, so starting with him seems like a good idea, but it shouldn't end with him.
That's already Twitter's explicit policy: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-interest
That's why this Mashable article (and the "experiment") isn't particularly enlightening. Twitter has made it very clear that they treat public figures differently from regular users, and did exactly what their policy says they will in the case of a rule-breaking tweet from one.
Well, it seems appropriate to discuss the consequences and justification of such a policy, then, doesn't it?
The same policy page you quoted also says that they are highly unlikely to make that particular exception in the case of glorification of violence. They did so anyway. Why? This is a fine example of how tricky it can be to actually enforce such a policy. Was it because "there is a more attenuated connection to actual violence"? Seems unlikely, the man is talking about shooting people. Was it because "Twitter is the only source of the information", the other context in which, according to their guidelines, they would possibly make an exception? They didn't censor the earlier tweet where Trump threatens to send in the National Guard, which was actually newsworthy, whereas the only newsworthy part of the tweet that did get slapped with a warning was that Trump had spoken to Tim Walz and told him "the military is with you all the way". Which is not substantially different from what he'd said earlier in a non-censored tweet, the only really novel bit is that he'd personally delivered the message to the governor. So then you have to weigh the newsworthiness of that tidbit of information, versus the clear conviction that the rest of the tweet glorifies violence and is therefore potentially harmful.
To me, that whole dilemma seems a bit absurd. It could have been avoided by a simple blanket ban on glorifying violence. Let Trump announce which governors he's had phone calls with without the added violent rhetoric. I struggle to see a scenario in which any information that is in the public interest to know would be lost.
Of course, and a lot of people have accused Twitter of creating that policy specifically so that they would have an excuse for not acting on Trump's tweets. They finally took some actions on some of his recent tweets, but these certainly haven't been the first ones that people thought they should have done something about.
Personally, I think the fundamental mistake almost everyone keeps making is assuming that these sites' policies mean anything at all. They have no obligation to follow them, nobody officially evaluates whether they're doing it well, and there's no punishment for not doing so. They're happy to twist the wording of their policies around to justify any action or inaction, and they've repeatedly rewritten or added new policies to retroactively justify past decisions. The reality is that the platforms just do whatever they want, and then use their policies to make it seem like they had no choice.
Episode #148 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast is an interview with Jack Dorsey where he explains the rationale for keeping Trump on Twitter.
It's not a fully satisfying answer (IMO the real reason is the amount of money Trump brings to Twitter, but I'm a cynic), but you might find it worthwhile to hear Jack's perspective.
He would either go through the official White House twitter, or find some other way to get his message out. If we can keep him speaking loudly and obviously, platforms can at least control how people interact with his message by blocking retweets and shares, like they're currently doing.
If they banned him, then the Tweets wouldn't exist, and thus couldn't be a matter of national and international interest.
If we take this to the extreme cases (which basically already happen), Twitter would allow genocidal authoritarians to publish on their platform calls for genocide, because those tweets would be very interesting. That sounds kind of fucked up doesn't it, when the alternative is to not allow anybody to call for genocide on your platform?
I'm not sure if this will scan, but is this a plausible scenario given your premise...
Applying this idea to something else: If we stop testing, we don't get new coronavirus cases.
He's going to think this, and he's going to find a way to broadcast it. By leaving an avenue available, but controlling the spread of the message, you can effectively control the power of the message. He's going to broadcast this stuff. Twitter got wise and started blocking how it spreads, limiting it to direct links and screenshots of the original tweet to limit its utility in encouraging violence.
That's not applying the same idea at all. The same idea in your chosen context would be this: "If we stop testing, we wouldn't have tests conducted or their results recorded."
I was clear in saying the "Tweets" wouldn't exist, not that Trump's white supremacy wouldn't exist.
Blocking the tweets is like not getting results: Kicking the evidence under the rug doesn't mean the thing didn't happen, and it makes it worse when it explodes.
We have the benefit of being able to see Trump for precisely what he is, because he's so loud about it. We didn't have that benefit with Nixon or Reagan, to name a couple of examples of presidents who were found to be profoundly racist for their times. They did a massive amount of damage to people of color. The harm they did wasn't revealed, and their racism, wasn't revealed until long after their deaths.
By and large, the biggest issue is that Twitter and the other platforms didn't stop him from the beginning. I agree that this is regrettable. We can't close it back up again without trying to cover up a significant part of recent history. However, the justification for many of Trump's policies and action are revealed on his private social media accounts. A lot of his worst decisions are laid bare, as well as his entire ideology. Not having this available would simply drive the hate underground. He and his team would get more creative, and it would be easier for him to get away with it.
Unfortunately, I think something of a double standard is useful to the global community. A racist US president has a huge effect on the rest of the world. A horrible world leader in any country has global implications. We just pulled out of the WHO for a whole host of reasons are likely evident by checking our unstable president's twitter, among other sources. Outright removing the worst behavior from world leaders, when this information should be preserved in the public record, does more to protect bad leaders than it does to protect any country's citizens.