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What does Donald Trump's current battle with Twitter have to do with coronavirus? The social media company this week took the unprecedented step of censoring some of the president's tweets for the first time ever. First it placed fact check notices against two of his tweets which warned about potential fraud in postal votes. Then it went one stage further, hiding one of his posts which appeared to call on the military to use force against protesters in Minneapolis. That tweet said the company violated its rules on glorifying violence.
This is the kind of spat we've become accustomed to in the three and a half years of the Trump presidency. So is it just a coincidence that this one is taking place against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic? Well, no.
One of the reasons the president has been so aggressive on social media in the last few weeks is that his main alternative outlet for rallying his base of supporters through large in-person events is no longer available to him. Instead, he has to engage them online. In fact, I would expect the next few months of the general election campaign to look very different from any we've ever seen before.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump will have to rally their troops and to raise money mainly online, and that will put platforms such as Facebook and Twitter more in the spotlight even than they were in 2016. I would expect, therefore, both Democrats and Republicans to put pressure on those platforms to act in certain ways. Republicans are likely to talk a lot about the supposed anti-conservative bias being shown by the likes of Twitter and Google.
Meanwhile, Democrats are going to be putting pressure on Facebook and Twitter to do more to censor and to fact check some of the more controversial content coming from Mr Trump and his supporters. And one thing is for certain, that without another outlet for his energy, I would expect the president to pick a lot more Twitter fights.
