It is not the job of Big Tech to decide whether we are allowed to hear from the likes of Donald Trump – Telegraph.co.uk

It is also a terrible risk to allow the speech of elected politicians to be switched off at the whim of unregulated Big Tech, informed by their anonymous Policy Committees, unaccountable to society at large. In a sophisticated democracy, it should be a matter of concern that Jack Dorsey can intercede between voters and their leaders. For while the majority of us can agree that Trump has behaved appallingly this week, what happens next week? What happens when the people and causes we champion are deleted? If Mark Zuckerberg felt that a Priti Patel speech on immigration was a violation? Or that we may no longer hear from Bibi Netanyahu or Jeremy Corbyn? The issue is not whether you like what they say, it is whether you should be entitled to hear it in the first place.

Vijaya Gadde, Twitters Policy Lead, admitted to Joe Rogan that her decisions are based on trial and error. They are a mass of moral contradictions: a doctor banned for offending vegans but mouthpieces of the Chinese state remaining. There is no real accountability here, no guarantee of consistency or fairness that would follow from Twitter accepting it is a publisher. If inciting violence is the threshold test, it is impossible to see how the Ayatollah Khamenei remains on Twitter where he defends Holocaust denial and calls for the State of Israel to be eradicated. The same point applies to Antifa and Extinction Rebellion and others.

Twitter is not a state broadcaster and is not obliged to broadcast anything. But what it should do is different from what it must. It should step back from censoring public figures, allowing sunlight to be the best disinfectant, especially in a democracy with speech restraints subject to the rule of law. To be a meaningful public space, social media should recognise that its power comes from enabling the public to interact with its leaders, not be hidden from them.

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It is not the job of Big Tech to decide whether we are allowed to hear from the likes of Donald Trump - Telegraph.co.uk