© Reuters / Jeenah Moon"Rise and Resist Against White Supremacy" rally in New York
Facebook and subsidiary Instagram banned a host of right-wing and conservative voices on Thursday, calling them"dangerous" "extremists." President Trump gave the blacklisted conservatives a show of support on Saturday, retweeting some of their content to his 60 million followers.
Twitter liberals were appalled. Among the accounts Trump retweeted were Infowars' Paul Joseph Watson, a conspiracy-heavy 'Qanon' account called 'Deep State Exposed,' and Rebel Media's Lauren Southern.
"There have been many low moment (sic) in the Trump presidency," liberal pamphleteer Judd Legum wrote, "His conduct on Twitter this AM may be the worst." Legum evidently considered retweeting conservatives a lower point that threatening Iran with war via tweet, or blasting Syria with cruise missiles.
Trump's decision to retweet Lauren Southern angered the mob the most. Like many on the right, Southern has often been pilloried for wrongthink, with her anti-immigrant polemics and documentary focusing on South Africa's controversial land-reform movement earning her the label of the internet's prettiest white supremacist.
The tweet in question from Southern was a tame one, warning establishment conservatives that they'd be next to face social media bans if they don't speak up. However, Southern ended her tweet with the "okay" hand gesture emoji, a symbol that, because nothing makes sense any more, now means "white power."
Had the Twitter sleuths done some digging, they would have learned that the "okay" emoji's association with white supremacy is a hoax, cooked up by 4chan to troll liberals. Sh*tposters and meme-makers spread the gesture far and wide, and the anti-Trump brigade took the bait with enthusiasm.
Such was the power of the meme magic at work that the gesture now exists simultaneously as a legitimate expression of white supremacy to the left, and a ridiculous in-joke to those in the know.
In using the emoji, Southern placed herself in the illustrious company of notorious white supremacists Barack Obama, Eddie Murphy, and 'Sesame Street's Swedish Chef.
Southern, for her part, denied the "white nationalist" label, and some of the more extreme accusations at her. But the triggering was already done.
With the culture war raging, it is still unclear what, if anything, Trump intends to do about Silicon Valley's censorship of conservatives. Opponents of censorship have argued that Facebook is a 'platform' for debate and not a 'publisher,' and is therefore bound to legally uphold free speech.
Trump appeared interested in this argument, retweeting a post from Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, in which Boreing suggests that, as a platform, Facebook can't simply "ban anyone for any reason."
The publisher/platform decision is a complex one, and would need to be decided by the courts. For now, the battle will be fought with meme-magic, spicy tweets, and weaponized emojis.
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