Jack Dorsey, Twitter opened a can of worms: Eurasia's Bremmer on Trump crackdown

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order aimed at social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Eurasia Group Founder & President Ian Bremmer joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to discuss.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMEN: I want to focus in on this social media executive order that the president is expected to sign at some point today. And I want to bring in Ian Bremmer on that. He's Eurasia Group founder and president. Ian, we have a lot to talk to you about, but I do want to ask you about this issue in particular because I know that you have looked consistently at the possibility of a contested election in the fall. And it feels as though this social media fight might feed into that at some point. I'm curious your thoughts on it.

IAN BREMMER: Sure. But an executive order in social media is going to get caught up in the courts immediately, so I don't think there's near-term impact on that for 2020. I also think that there is a very serious reason why people like Mark Zuckerberg do not want to be seen as publishers because there is massive cost on them and there is responsibility on them.

So the fact that Jack from Twitter, who likes to go off to caves for a couple of months and meditate and only have one meal a day and is now thinking, oh, my god, what have I done wrong for society? He's starting to question his basic business model. Everyone else in the field is not questioning their basic business model. They're making a lot of money. And Twitter has shareholders too, so I really think that this is probably not going to go very far.

And I think that Jack has opened a massive can of worms for himself. Because it's one thing-- for the people that run social media, it's one thing, as engineers, to say Alex Jones is promoting a fake cure for coronavirus, and that is dangerous to people, and we're going to take it down. And for Facebook, by the way, Instagram to take down when Bolsonaro does the same thing. Because they're scientists, technologists. They see that we know what facts are when it comes to a virus, when it comes to health.

But when you're talking about a political statement, even if that political statement can be proven as false, as one of the 18,000 falsehoods that Trump has told, according to the Washington Post, there are gradations. And you will be born out as fake news and you're going to get punished very heavily for that. And almost nobody in this field wants to be on one side of that or the other.

Trump knows that. It's one of his big advantages going into this election. He has vastly more social media followers than Biden, just as he did over Clinton. And also, his tweets get a lot more engagement, even than Obama's overall. Why? Because they're magnified massively by people that support him, some of whom are real and some of whom are trolls and bots. So he's not going to give that up. It's not like Trump's going anywhere. I think it's amusing that he criticized Twitter on Twitter. That tells you all you need to know.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Ian, I'm curious because you bring up-- you're mixing two issues here, which are tied together. You've got social media and Twitter, and then you brought up Bolsonaro and then issues with COVID-19 and vaccines. Could the president use the social media platform to continue to polarize the world? And then you get this race for, we're going to produce a vaccine for us but not for them situation. Where do we stand in that situation? Is it the United States versus everyone else?

IAN BREMMER: It's certainly the United States versus a lot of folks. The idea that we would suggest pulling out of the World Health Organization during a freaking pandemic is about one of the stupidest things you might suggest. I have problems with the World Health Organization. They're a weak organization. They're led by weenies, in the sense-- but that's our fault.

We will not allow a strong WHO. We will not let the WHO be led by people that will criticize us for not having working tests, nor will the Chinese-- a funder-- allow the WHO to be led by people that call them out for not giving them direct access or transparency in what the Chinese are covering up in terms of human-to-human transmission. That is a structural problem. But as Donald Rumsfeld would say, you find a pandemic with the WHO you have, not the WHO you want. So breaking it doesn't help us.

And I think when it comes to the vaccine and the WHO and the European Union coming together and say, we want to work together to have a vaccine that would give access to everyone, and meanwhile, the Americans, the Chinese, and a lot of other countries working very strongly to ensure that we get vaccines faster, that we have control, we have money, and our guys get them before anywhere else. I just saw an American company with the US government support buying a Czech company-- I think was Praha-something-- that has access. They own the largest industrial vaccine producer in the world.

And this would give you, in 2021, a billion doses of vaccine for a vaccine that, if it works, you need two doses. That's 500 million people. Who's going to get that first? You think China is going to get it? No. We'll get it. And if the Chinese develop their vaccine first in the lash-up they have with the Canadians, who is going to get it first? US? No, China.

As we're heading towards immense confrontation with the Chinese, you're going to have vaccine nationalism. It should be obvious to everyone that we don't want that. That it's a global coronavirus, we should want a global response. But we are not going to get a global response. We're going to get a geopolitically fraught response that's going to intensify the confrontation that we presently have on the world stage today.

- I just want to go back to the social media aspect of this and President Trump's executive order. He's basically saying that what Twitter and Facebook and Google and the like are doing is purposely censoring Republican voices. It's been proven that that's not really an issue, though. And in fact, a lot of these companies have been criticized for appealing to the Republicans' wins.

When you look at something like this, the idea that the internet is run or based on, currently, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, say the executive order goes through or say that he makes some kind of change or asks the FTC or FCC to make some kind of change that guts the Section 230. What happens to the internet? And then what happens to these companies?

IAN BREMMER: Well, number one, if you're saying that companies have to be forced to equally police, they'll just stop running a lot of the comments that they presently run. They'd have to because they can't be responsible for that. It would be too expensive.

And the alternative is that you end up with-- again, when it finally comes out-- saying that there are certain government officials for whom these standards don't apply. And so you're not going to be able to-- no, Trump was not censored. But Trump put out a tweet or two tweets that then had a almost warning label on it, kind of like a pack of cigarettes. We'll let you buy it, but warning, it could kill you. Warning, this tweet might be false. Why don't you check out this news?

Well, first of all, if anyone on Twitter actually thinks that a warning label under a Trump tweet is going to do anything other than make it more viral, you're insane. You're spending-- you clearly don't know how Twitter actually works. So this was one where Jack, he was under a lot of pressure, Trump is going out, he's retweeting that Joe Scarborough from "Morning Joe" might have killed somebody. The family is saying, people are coming after me, they're coming out-- why are you dragging us through this?

Mitt Romney, who is a Republican sort of but did vote against Trump and the impeachment, the only one that did, is saying, come on, why don't you do something? But Mitt's not prepared to actually censor or support a censor of Trump. So Susan Collins is deeply concerned-- deeply concerned-- about all of this, but she's not going to do anything, Republican senator from Maine who might well lose her position in November. So everyone's hand-wringing. Everyone's offering thoughts and prayers.

And here, you've got Jack from Twitter-- Jack Dorsey-- saying, OK, I will take the arrows from everyone. I'll be the voice above-- the head that pops up above the parapet. Probably there's a reason why no one else wants to be this person. Right? And that's what he's finding now. So I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that the business model for social media is fundamentally broken for civil society.

The argument for social media is that we give everyone a voice. We create, as Mark Zuckerberg would say, a community. We're all a community. But what the business model actually is, is we must have as much access to your data as possible so that we can sell it. And the way we get access to data is not by being a community. We get access to data by ensuring that you only digest information that you like, and we can get you to maximize eyeballs on the site by seeing even more narrowly defined-- the filter bubble, as Eli Pariser called it-- narrowly defined information.

That's not the public square. In fact, it's the exact antithesis of the public square. It's treating citizens like consumers. And we are both. But the idea that a company can pretend to be one but is actually the other is pissing off a lot of people. And Trump knows that he has a huge structural advantage on social media, and he's using his power base and the fact that he drives a lot of traffic and money for these companies to ensure that he continues to maximize that advantage. Horrible for civil society in the United States, but very politically savvy for Trump, and I understand why he's doing it.

JULIE HYMEN: Ian, I want to switch back to the China issue. How effective is Trump's bully pulpit going to be on that issue? Are we in another Cold War? And if so, the last one lasted quite a while. Is this the new normal for years to come, that we're going to have this adversarial relationship?

IAN BREMMER: We are in a technology Cold War, and I first made that call last year. The fact is that the Chinese will not let some dominant US tech companies into China-- the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Twitter. And why should we allow Chinese companies in the United States, and why should we not use our influence to keep them out of our allies and profit and grab that data and have strategic influence if they're not going to give reciprocity to American firms?

As the soon-to-be largest economy in the world, I'm completely onboard with that. That doesn't mean that Huawei is evil. That doesn't mean that they deserve to die. But it does mean that they are actively competitive with us, and there's a zero sum-ness in that relationship.

We are not yet in a Cold War with China writ large, but we are heading in that direction. We're heading in that direction in terms of supply chain being broadly unwound. There are a lot of companies that used to think their future was China-- the NBA, Hollywood, big banks. Increasingly, those companies don't see the same options for themselves in China they did before.

There's no rule of law in China, no independent judiciary. Chinese companies are getting stronger, and they're using their competitive advantage with their alignment with the Chinese government, their access to Chinese credit. So that's becoming a problem. Not a lot of voices in the US, saying, hey, we need closer relations with China.

Mark Zuckerberg-- let's go back to him-- he learned Mandarin in part because he wanted access to China. Now he's saying, strategically, no, China's a real threat to my model. We need to do something about that. So just in five years, he's changed his tune dramatically, as China's now a technology superpower.

But then we've got Hong Kong that's coming up. And specifically in Hong Kong, we have our Secretary of State Mike Pompeo yesterday saying they're no longer autonomous. And I think that's right. I think with this new national security law, there is no longer one country, two systems.

Now, the big question going forward is, will the Americans withdraw the special trade status that we afford Hong Kong? Completely within our rights to do so. Logically, you would understand why that would happen. I don't think it will happen because there are a lot of American companies that do business in Hong Kong that will be adversely impacted if we take that decision. They will lobby the Trump Administration not to put that in place. We don't want to hurt Hong Kong more than we hurt mainland China.

So instead, I expect we will put sanctions on a bunch of mid-level Chinese officials that have been involved in the crackdown. We might say that Hong Kong will have export tariffs that are similar to China, mainland China, that will not impact our companies in the same way. The question that Yahoo Finance is going to be most interested in is, to what extent does this mean Hong Kong persists as a global financial center? Because some of that is the legal architecture and the regulatory architecture, and some of that is sentiment. Some of that is, do we trust that Hong Kong can continue to exist in this way, and how will we act as a consequence?

And I think the answer to that is, whether or not this decision is a tipping point, the broader context of the relationship is moving people to decide that, no, it's not Hong Kong. If you want to do business in China, you're in Shanghai or Shenzhen. If you want rule of law, you're in Singapore or Seoul or Tokyo. But there really is no-- as we are moving towards a broader Cold War, the ability of Hong Kong to act as an entrepot is really going away. And they will suffer mightily as a consequence of that.

JULIE HYMEN: You know your audience, Ian. Thank you for addressing that question. Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group founder and president. Always good to see you joining us from New York there. And we'll be right back.