Why Trump is so angry about social media censorship — and why there’s not much he can do about it

Social media can’t stop regulating itself, depriving Trump of a potent get-out-the-vote machine

President Trump is hosting a Social Media Summit today at the White House to call attention to what he says is the censorship of conservatives on major social media platforms — not long after Reddit quarantined one of his biggest cheerleading sections at /r/The_Donald. (On Reddit, to ‘quarantine’ a subreddit means it won’t show up on the home page anymore, and users need to subscribe to the subreddit to gain access to content, typically slowing the growth of the subreddit and limiting its exposure, and often acting as a prelude to a full-on ban).

The complaint is old: conservatives have been saying the media is biased against them since at least the 1950s, when they began a concerted effort to found their own media outfits to slip past the traditional newspapers and magazines that didn’t print their views. But for Trump in particular, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even, to an extent, Google, are fomenting a potent challenge to his political movement — and the White House isn’t taking it sitting down. But even as the Trump admin tries to find ways to respond to the…