I TWEET, you tweet, he or she breaks the spirit of the law. In the madhouse which passes for American politics at the moment, many folks seem more exercised by Trump’s social media bans than they are about the fact his fan club trashed their seat of government.

Like most folk in my trade, I spent Wednesday, January 6 riveted to live coverage of the USA giving the world an exercise in how not to do democracy. And, as many have observed, had this started out as a peaceful march to advance civil rights rather than a baying mob, the marchers would have been swiftly handcuffed and dumped in a police fan.

Without Twitter, Trump has lost his voice, and I am not among the mourners. Those Americans, like his unlovely sons, who are screaming it’s an offence against basic freedom of speech, might pause to wonder about the freedom of elected representatives to go about their lawful business.

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At the core of the fuss is the first amendment of the American constitution which advances the proposition that anyone should be at liberty to express their opinion. In some eyes this is a sacred injunction, rather like the second amendment which talks of the right to bear arms.

That translates in modern times to bunches of thugs wandering the streets with enough battle-grade weaponry to take over the average small country.

The US constitution, lest we forget, is almost 250 years old. It was a document for its time, and the right to your own voice and your own rifle was in case some dodgy government tried to annex your property and your vote.

It was not envisaged as a call to heavy duty arms, so that average households could stash away their own private gun store. No accident that thousands of Americans die of gunshot wounds, including in recent years, primary schoolchildren and high school students.

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As for the Twitter ban? It’s now been extended to 70-plus accounts attached to QAnon, one of the wilder conspiracy theory spreaders. Inter alia, its adherents believe that Democrats like the former First Lady are involved in a satanic paedophile ring and that God has sent Trump to see them off. Until a week past Wednesday, that might just have seemed loopy rather than downright dangerous.

But, whines Don Jnr (a man shaping up to be even more odious than his male parent), there are Twitter and Facebook accounts that are still up and running for all kinds of foreign dictators. Is his point that the homegrown variety should have equal status?

Yet it does raise one issue with which our group wrestled when we sat on the Scottish equivalent of the Leveson Inquiry – MacLeveson, as it became known.

If you publish a newspaper, you are responsible for the contents. If these break the laws of slander or libel – depending on where they appear – then you can be sued. Your editor, in theory, can be sent to the pokey.

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But those who own Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc have always been careful not to be characterised as publishers, which means their account holders get away with all manner of invective with no obvious penalty.

It’s instructive that Trump’s online megaphone was only removed after his inflammatory speech had been accused of being complicit in a riotous assembly which has now cost six lives and an incalculable amount of reputational damage for America.

So I do not have the answer as to how we de-couple freedom of speech from online abuse. I’m just very happy that every morning there is at least one tweet I don’t have to hastily scroll past in order not to spoil breakfast.

A final thought. When Joe Biden stands in front of the Capitol at his inauguration, there will, despite the pandemic, be a large, armed crowed. It will consist of the national guard protecting a new president from the arrant folly of the last.

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