Twitch temporarily bans President Trump

Regardless of what people think about the current president, the banning of a sitting president on a platform will have enormous implications for the tech industry.

I expect one of the first things will be losing their Section 230 immunity and being treated more like publishers instead of telecos (this has actually already started, so perhaps I'm not being super creative here...).

Second, should he win a second term, I expect Trump will have the Federal Election Commission investigate this, as their bias (not just Twitch, but anyone) will probably be targeted as unregistered Superpacs. This will probably cause fallout on both sides of the political spectrum over time.

Future presidents & politicians of all parties are going to have something to say about this too - especially when they feel they are treated unfairly.

I think that platforms will have to become less "public" in order to minimize their liability. For instance, you don't need an account to view tweets, so it being truly "private" communications can be challenged (i.e. it is not the same as communication on a members-only forum that is inaccessible to the general public).

Twitter and others may have to seriously reconsider their current openness. Twitch probably will have the same issue, as I can watch a gamer like NickEh30 at https://www.twitch.tv/nickeh30 without an account easily .

Honestly, I don't know what the right answer is, as censoring speech is a tricky proposition (and has been since the beginning of time in democracies). But I do know that the politics surrounding this issue is about to get a lot louder on all sides of the political spectrum. Hold on tight - 2020 is about to get even more fun...not.

I didn't know the president had a Twitch account.

>One of the streams in question was a rebroadcast of Trump’s infamous kickoff rally, where he said that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Twitch also flagged racist comments at Trump’s recent rally in Tulsa.

Oh, it was a channel for campaign rallies. That makes more sense.

But this puts us into deep hot water so far as content platforms go. This is removing the campaign content of a sitting president. For a platform to be unfavorable to on candidate over another as a matter of policy (whatsoever the official stated reasons may be) politicizes the platform, moves them into being "not a platform but a publisher". If there is to be any investigation of electoral meddling, it should be into the political bias of technology companies, and if Trump wins another term, that is likely exactly what will occur.