“Nobody in the world will see us the same way in the future,” said Richard Haass after the storm on the Capitol. January 6, according to the grand master of US foreign policy, could herald the beginning of the post-American era.
With the impeachment proceedings in the Senate, the legal appraisal of one of the most furious presidencies in US history begins. The process, however, which should end with the impeachment of a president who is no longer in office – and even that is not certain – can at best be part of the self-purification of American democracy.
If historians look back at the Trump phenomenon from a distance, three explanatory patterns could play a role for the apparently inexplicable.
There is globalization, which has equalized prosperity between nations, but has distributed it unevenly within the large western democracies – especially in the USA, which only has rudimentary social compensation mechanisms. Trump correctly recognized that the American dream was nothing but a fairy tale – and gathered the frustrated.
Second, there is the unprocessed financial crisis, which robbed capitalism or its vulgar form, financial capitalism, of its legitimacy. Individualizing profits, collectivizing losses, that has disaffected even the most loyal followers of the free market. In the end, liberalism as such also suffered. Trump benefited.
And last but not least, there is the seemingly unstoppable rise of social media, which has now dominated political discourse and poisoned it in parts. No one understood the new mechanisms of this new communication better than Trump.
Social media platforms dominate political discourse
The first two phenomena are broadly thematized and analyzed, the third aspect is relatively new and unexplored. Trump is the best subject to study for gaining knowledge. The most important instrument of power was his Twitter-Channel through which he was able to entertain his almost 90 million followers over the years, sometimes mislead them or simply lie to them. The nation’s first angry citizen was also the most powerful of all influencers. His goal: to create a post-factual era.
It was only when Twitter recently disconnected Trump from his channel that the last tech fan also realized: How to deal with the major social media platforms Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Co. is a political issue. First there was big applause when Twitter boss Jack Dorsey Trump took the loudspeaker after the storm on the Capitol. At second glance, everyone suddenly realized how powerful “social media” had become.
Questions arise: Are a few billionaires from Silicon Valley allowed to determine the rules of political discourse? Don’t we need democratically legitimized rules for this? Is it right that platforms have the power to mute presidents?
The hatred fuels the hatred on the platforms
The Chancellor expressed concern that an American president also had the right to freedom of expression. The new US President Joe Biden himself is determined to abolish the so-called “Section 230”, the Magna Charta of the network companies, according to which the Internet companies are not liable for the content posted by their users. And that’s good.
In fact, the fact that nearly a third of Americans believe Biden is an illegitimate president also has to do with social media. The platforms have become the echo chambers of societies. Their attention-grabbing algorithms dictate how users perceive the world. Anyone who follows a radical Trump supporter online will be fed a large number of such preachers via an algorithm.
The business model is to generate traffic and collect data. The strongest binding agent is emotions – the more pointed, the better, the angrier, the more attractive, the simpler, the more efficient. The hatred fuels the hatred.
His Twitter channel was the most important instrument of power for Donald Trump.
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(Photo: AFP)
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This is not a purely American phenomenon. But there the development is well advanced. And besides Biden, the Europeans are already looking for ways to limit not only the market power, but above all the power of opinion of the “big tech” companies or at least to ensure that they are responsible for the content on their platforms. Antitrust and press law provide politicians with the right tools for this.
“The medium is the message”
Still, it’s a tricky business. Because the right to freedom of expression is a valuable asset. Any suspicion of censorship is a hit for populists. And that shouldn’t be forgotten either: Social media were a central instrument of freedom movements such as the Orange Revolution or the Arab Spring.
Neutral – as media history shows – is not a medium. “The medium is the message,” the communications researcher Marshall McLuhan knew half a century ago. It shapes our cognitive apparatus, so it has a decisive influence on how we perceive the world. Our societies are visibly overwhelmed when dealing with social media – they are omnipresent and permeate all areas of life. As the examples of Reddit and Gamestop show, social media are also taking over the financial markets.
In the end, January 6th will certainly not usher in the decline of America. But perhaps this day will go down in history as a turning point in the relationship between society and social media. Facebook should not be a “judge of the truth,” says Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. True, but Facebook also has to bear responsibility for the truth – that became clear by the age of four years of Trumpism at the latest.
More: Supervisors on both sides of the Atlantic want to tighten the rules for the major Internet platforms. There is already a model for the guidelines.
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