“Blood and glass" and the power of Big Tech

A little more than ten years after the start of the Arab Spring — a popular pro-democracy revolution helped along by Facebook and Twitter — the world's largest social media platforms this week banned the US president for inciting deadly violence in the United States.

If ever there were an illustration of the simultaneous promise, peril, and more importantly the power of social media to shape our lives and politics, this is it.

Not surprisingly, the Trump ban — and the decision by Apple, Amazon, and Google to expel other right-wing platforms where Trump supporters had plotted violence — has raised a host of thorny questions about how to define free speech, how to regulate tech companies, and what comes next at a delicate and dangerous moment in the "world's oldest democracy." Let's decode some of it.

This isn't, legally speaking, a "free speech" debate. The Bill of Rights in the US Constitution offers no inalienable right to post on Twitter or Facebook, much less to be published, say, by Simon and Shuster. What's more, free speech laws generally stop short of permitting incitement to violence, the primary reason for the tech companies' recent actions.

But it is about the staggering and seemingly arbitrary power of technology companies to shape what is, in practice, the main public square of the 21st century.

Agree or not with the tech companies' decisions here, we don't know much about how those decisions were reached, or by whom. Well beyond Trump's supporters, critics as wide-ranging as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, and the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union pointed out the dangers of arbitrary tech censorship, or the potential powerlessness of people with far less power and recourse to fight back than the US president.

Part of the reason that this is even an issue is that the tech companies have gotten so big in the first place. If Facebook had 200,000 users rather than 2 billion, it wouldn't matter much. So implicit in all of this is the question, again, of if/how to regulate tech companies, and whether to reduce their power to control speech and markets in ways that may inflict harm on society.

Three regulation models. Globally, there are basically three main approaches to tech regulation at the moment. In China, tech companies — some of the world's largest — are privately-run but expected to act as the loyal arms of an authoritarian state, advancing its interests at home and abroad (sometimes even with help from Silicon Valley). In the EU, where by contrast there are very few tech firms of global scale, governments set strict rules on privacy, speech, competition, and transparency which companies must adhere to in order to gain access to a lucrative market of 500 million relatively high-income people.

Lastly, the US — cradle of what are still the world's most influential tech giants — has taken a hands-off approach: tech companies have until now been left largely to regulate themselves, and enjoy certain protections against liability for material posted on their sites. That light touch is what helped them become giants in the first place.

Where does the US go now? In recent years both mainstream US political parties have warmed to the idea of stronger regulation of tech companies, though for different reasons. Republicans allege liberal bias in Silicon valley, while Democrats are primarily worried about policing hate speech and protecting privacy.

Last week's events have supercharged both sides' concerns: Republicans are crying foul over the "deplatforming" of their supporters, while top Democrats see those actions as too little, too late. "It took blood and glass in the halls of Congress" for tech firms to act, said Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a leading voice on tech regulatory issues.

Of course, as a result of last week's Georgia Senate runoff, it is now Democrats who will assume (razor-thin) control over Congress along with the White House, putting them in a position to start advancing their vision of what better tech regulation should look like.

More from GZERO Media

President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he leaves the White House for a trip to Florida on April 3, 2025.
Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto via Reuters

Stocks have plummeted, layoffs have begun, and confusion has metastasized about the bizarre method the United States used to calculate its tariff formula. But Donald Trump says it’s “going very well."

African National Congress (ANC) members of parliament react after South African lawmakers passed the budget's fiscal framework in Cape Town, South Africa, April 2, 2025.
REUTERS/Esa Alexander

The second largest party in South Africa’s coalition, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, launched a legal challenge on Thursday to block a 0.5% VAT increase in the country’s new budget, raising concerns that the fragile government could collapse.

The Israeli Air Force launched an airstrike on Thursday, targeting a building in the Mashrou Dummar area of Damascus. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant confirmed Israel's responsibility for the attack, which resulted in one fatality.
Rami Alsayed via Reuters Connect
A man leaves the U.S. headquarters of the social media company TikTok in Culver City, California, U.S. January 17, 2025.
REUTERS/David Swanson

Remember the TikTok ban? The new deadline President Donald Trump set for the app to find an American buyer or be banned from US app stores, midnight Saturday, is rapidly approaching.

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz looks on as he sits next to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office on March 13, 2025.

REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Someone needs to take National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s phone out of his hand.

President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025.

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Donald Trump’s much-anticipated “liberation day” tariff announcement on Wednesday is the biggest disruption to global trade in decades, so the political, diplomatic, and economic impacts will take time to become clear.

Elon Musk waves to the crowd as he exits the stage during a town hall on Sunday, March 30, 2025, at the KI Convention Center in Green Bay, Wis.

Tork Mason/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin via Reuters

Donald Trump is reportedly telling people that he and Elon Musk have agreed that Musk’s work in the US government will soon be done. Politico’s story broke just as Musk seems to have discovered the electoral limits of his charm.