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.