The tweet that was “censored” by Twitter according to the President
Considering the political polarisation of the United States, the math is simple. The President’s Republican support is rock-solid, his base having emerged from the impeachment saga remarkably unified. He might be historically unpopular, his disapproval ratings consistently hovering in the low-to-mid-50s, but that consistency also means that most people seem to have made up their mind about him. Indeed, with this Executive Order, Trump is trying to make the conversation less directly about himself, and more about the social media platforms in question (and perhaps even more about the institution of fact-checking itself). And he has reason to believe that these are more convenient goalposts for the game he is playing.
Most Americans appear to agree that social media platform operators engage in political censorship. This is true regardless of party affiliation, with 85% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats holding this view. There might be disagreement over the nature of censorship, as Republicans famously believe that social media platforms are tilted against them (64% say this), but there is also a non-negligible (28%) section of Democrats who are of the same opinion. Fact-checking fares no better, with 70% of Republicans, 29% of Democrats, and 47% of independents believing it to be mostly biased regardless of the type of media.
This means there is considerable distrust toward one of the main filters through which voters obtain information by and about the President. As legally ineffective as the Executive Order is likely to be, it could kick off a series of public debates that might not necessarily make people develop a new-found affection for Trump directly, but—there being more openness to such ideas—might reinforce existing negative narratives about platform operators and fact-checkers that sometimes push back against the President’s messages, thereby blunting the perceived seriousness and credibility of these pushbacks. This would not be unlike the Biden-related controversy at the heart of Trump’s impeachment, which polling shows to have resulted in 15% of democratic voters saying that the narrative has made them less likely to vote for the former Vice President. Even with 13% saying it has made them more likely to vote for him, this is a net loss for Trump’s opponent—and thus a win for the President.
“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation,” Don Draper famously said in the third season of Mad Men. With his Executive Order, another Donald is apparently hoping to move the conversation away from, among other things, whether his recent statements, most notably on Twitter, regarding mail-in voting fraud were misleading (they were) toward what would essentially be a trial on social media platforms’ political bias. Expect little in the way of policy shifts, but lots of sidetracking into discussions of Twitter and Facebook censorship—that is, if and when the coronavirus death toll and the protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd yield centre stage.