Twitter’s stock crashed by more than 12 percent in heavy trading the following Monday. What the internet gives, the internet takes away.
Consider George Floyd. In May of 2020, a video of Floyd’s death began trending on Twitter about 12 hours after it took place. About a day later, Floyd began trending on CNN.com. He became CNN’s top story only after trending on Twitter for nearly three days straight.
Videos of policemen fighting citizens show up on Twitter all the time. They fizzle out. Just last month, a video hit Twitter of a white man dying the same way as Floyd—high on methamphetamine, pinned by policemen and screaming “I can’t breathe.” Few cared.
But Floyd was black and May of 2020 was campaign season. Joe Biden lacked enthusiastic support. Meanwhile, President Trump threatened Twitter with federal regulation in an executive order. By stoking left-wing outrage online, social media platforms could get Biden’s voting bloc fired up and terrified of Trumpists again.
What trends on Twitter gets picked by Twitter. It’s foolish to think the site runs on a neutral, self-balancing algorithm. No such thing exists.
But there is a solution. State courts or state legislatures should clarify that victims of political discrimination may always sue for breach of the contractual covenant of good faith. The covenant of good faith is like an automatic good-faith clause added by law to every contact. If, for example, a grocer agrees to ship “five melons of his choosing,” the covenant implicitly says that he cannot choose five spoiled melons.
Any American ought to be able to do whatever he pleases—except when his acts cause problems for others that others cannot easily manage on their own. That’s exactly what corporate political bigots do. It’s time to free America from their misrule.
Sean Ross Callaghan is an attorney, a tech entrepreneur, and a onetime federal law clerk.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
