Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

by Dan Pfeiffer

Stop the bullying and ban the trolls. Twitter the company has utterly failed to police their own platform. Scroll through the mentions of a woman or a person of color on Twitter and you are bound to be horrified by what you read. There is racism, misogyny, and threats of violence and sexual assault. This problem existed long before Trump, but his rise enabled and empowered far-right hate accounts to be more public. Twitter has even verified some of these hate mongers, giving them the vaunted “blue checkmark.” Twitter has been impossibly slow to act in part because kicking a bunch of people off the platform would exacerbate the problem of anemic user growth. But this is a solvable problem: Enforce their policies against hate speech and bullying with a consistent zero tolerance policy. End the anonymity granted to users. There is no valid reason to let people spew hate anonymously. Much of the hate, abuse, and trolling would immediately disappear if people had to do it for the world to see using their real names. Ban hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I am sympathetic to Twitter’s views about the First Amendment, but the Constitution doesn’t grant people the right to use Twitter for their speech. Stop the bots: With the help of Russia, thousands of automated accounts shifted the conversation on Twitter in ways favorable to Trump. This is probably the easiest problem to solve. Twitter just has to want to do it. OK, so Twitter seems terrible. It reminds...