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Good morning. Amid all the solemn words about an appalling assault on democracy, the relish felt by those who’ve long opposed Donald Trump - that they finally now have a smoking gun to bring him down - has been hard to hide. But when you’re eager for a cause, you can sometimes miss the significance of who else you find on your side of the argument.

Twitter permanently suspended the president at the weekend, due to the risk of his further inciting violence. While many celebrated this decision, it would be easy to miss the irony. For much of the last 15 years, figures in government have been pondering how best to regulate social media giants. Now social media giants are regulating figures in government. Meanwhile, those dismayed by the president have flailed around different institutional means to curtail or halt his antics. But it’s taken a corporate organisation to stop him in his tracks.

This might be a positive development for opponents of Donald Trump. But is it a red-letter day for democracy? Voltaire is alleged to have said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.’ Just because I don’t like what a public figure says, and I think he’s gone outside any reasonable bounds of free speech, that doesn’t automatically make it a great idea for a private business to make the call about closing down what has hitherto been the president’s principal mouthpiece throughout his tenure at the White House.

Jesus told a parable about a field in which wheat and weeds were both growing. The farmer realised he couldn’t gather the weeds without uprooting the wheat at the same time. So he let both wheat and weeds grow until the harvest, when the weeds could be removed more easily.
Society and government have huge questions to face about social media, about the weaponisation of personal data, and about the massive power of a few companies to determine who can speak, and what they can say. It seems a strange time to invest even more power in those companies, even if their decisions happen to align with your own on this occasion.

Allowing the wheat and weeds to grow in Washington right now means letting democratic institutions arrest and prosecute rioters, and taking the president through a formal congressional process of censure, perhaps even deposition. But trying to remove the weeds before harvest, by letting a massive social media company curtail your opponent’s right to speak, is a dangerous game. Because the next person that business chooses to quieten down might be you.

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