Twitter and Trump

I heard the news last week that Twitter had permanently banned Trump and thought “oh my.”

Sure it is wonderful news that the lies, the hate, the awfulness that is the current President of the United States will no longer be available on Twitter (where I am still a shareholder) and no longer in the White House very soon.

But as a very wise person texted me Friday morning:

Do you think it is appropriate? Do you think it is problematic that they have this much power?

Yes, I think it is problematic that Twitter has this much power. Not only are they silencing Trump, they are taking away his tens of millions of followers, and they are prohibiting all of his followers from seeing his tweets.

We should be careful what we wish for. This is a slippery slope we are heading down.

It is long past time that we move away from centralized applications to protocols.

If Twitter was a protocol, Twitter the app could ban the President from using its application and could block his tweets from being available in its app. But Trump could use another Twitter protocol client and his followers could as well and all of that social graph would still be available to them.

That is the way the web works. That is the way email works. That is the way social media should work as well and it is high time we start moving there.

This should be a warning sign to everyone in DC; the Senators, the Representatives, the folks leaving the White House and the folks entering it. He who kills the king becomes the king.

It is time to force the big centralized apps to open up. It is time to force the mobile app stores to open up. The longer we wait the worse this will get.

Update: My partner Albert posted his thoughts on this topic last night and I agree with them. You can read them here.