have to do with coronavirus?

The social media company this week

took the unprecedented step of censoring

some of the president's tweets for the first time ever.

First it placed fact check notices

against two of his tweets which warned about potential fraud

in postal votes.

Then it went one stage further, hiding one of his posts

which appeared to call on the military

to use force against protesters in Minneapolis.

That tweet said the company violated its rules

on glorifying violence.

This is the kind of spat we've become accustomed to

in the three and a half years of the Trump presidency.

So is it just a coincidence that this one

is taking place against the backdrop

of the coronavirus pandemic?

Well, no.

One of the reasons the president has been so aggressive

on social media in the last few weeks

is that his main alternative outlet

for rallying his base of supporters

through large in-person events is no longer available to him.

Instead, he has to engage them online.

In fact, I would expect the next few months

of the general election campaign to look very different from any

we've ever seen before.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump will have to rally their troops

and to raise money mainly online,

and that will put platforms such as Facebook and Twitter

more in the spotlight even than they were in 2016.

I would expect, therefore, both Democrats and Republicans

to put pressure on those platforms

to act in certain ways.

Republicans are likely to talk a lot about the supposed

anti-conservative bias being shown by the likes of Twitter

and Google.

Meanwhile, Democrats are going to be putting pressure

on Facebook and Twitter to do more to censor

and to fact check some of the more

controversial content coming from Mr

Trump and his supporters.

And one thing is for certain, that without another outlet

for his energy, I would expect the president

to pick a lot more Twitter fights.