The decision of Twitter to mark some of Donald Trump's tweets about mail-in ballots with notices implying they contained misinformation, may have been welcomed by the many critics of the US president, but some say the move was short-sighted. After all, how does Trump differ from any other public figure whose tweets may need to be 'corrected' with a 'fact check'?
Apparently, in at least one case, Twitter couldn't come up with a good answer, and instead chose to issue more notices. It dug up some March tweets by Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, who infamously accused the US military of possibly starting the Covid-19 epidemic by bringing the coronavirus into his country.
Twitter has been labeling what it believes to be Covid-19 misinformation on its platform since mid-May, but those particular notices were issued on purpose. At least that's what the New York Post believes, saying it was done after they confronted Twitter about its apparent double standards in targeting Trump and not the Chinese official.
Quite a few commentators pointed out that Twitter is putting itself in a vulnerable position by getting involved in what is essentially a political quarrel - regardless of whether Trump delivers on his threat to "regulate or shut down" social media in retaliation.
Twitter's move against Trump's tweet is probably horrifying to fellow social media giant Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, responded to it by reiterating in an interview with Fox News his long-held position that private companies shouldn't be "the arbiter of truth."
His counterpart at Twitter, Jack Dorsey, insists that his company is not taking on that role. "Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves," he tweeted.
One person's reality is another person's dystopia. Who is to judge 'what is real' in the broad spectrum of beliefs, possibilities, experiences and outcomes? Each decision creates a collapse of options - furthering divide rather than consolidation - by eliminating free speech and the right to express opinion. Just like the coronavirus, our minds are being systematically locked into quarantine.Twitter reacted later in the day by tagging both with a "Get the facts about mail-in ballots" link, leading to a collection of mainstream media articles denouncing the president's claim as false. Trump denounced the move as an act of interference in the 2020 presidential election.
One of the problems with this, is that the supposedly false statement is a non-falsifiable opinion, pointed Will Chamberlain, publisher of the conservative magazine Human Events:
Donald Trump Junior reacted to the news:
The Trump 2020 campaign also weighed in, revealing that it pulled all advertising from Twitter "months ago" due to the platform's "clear political bias."
"Partnering with the biased fake news media 'fact checkers' is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility," said campaign manager Brad Parscale.
President Trump has long used Twitter as his social medium of choice, leveraging the platform to directly reach US voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election and bypassing the mainstream media that overwhelmingly supported his opponent. After the election, the media and Democrats put enormous pressure on social platforms to censor, ban, expel and "fact-check" opinions they disagreed with.
Tuesday's oped by a liberal New York Times columnist declared that "Twitter must cleanse the Trump stain."
"The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google," Trump wrote on Twitter. "The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation."UPDATE 28/05/2020: The National Pulse has obtained a draft copy of Trump's executive order:
The president shared a video of a speech from conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who stood up for fellow conservatives who were removed from social media platforms because of their beliefs.
"Thank you Michelle!" he wrote.
The order explicitly calls out Big Tech companies for openly working with the Chinese Communist Party and its military.
The order pursues the long-addressed "Section 230" argument protecting Big Tech firms.
The order also calls large social media platforms "the functional equivalent of a traditional public forum" and states these firms "should not infringe on protected speech".
The White House reveals in the EO that they received "over 16,000 complaints of online platforms censoring or otherwise taking action against users based on their political viewpoints". The complaints system has been online since May 2019.
READ IN FULL:
Disclaimer: As a draft document, this EO may have been altered since this version was created.Trump's Draft Executive... by Raheem Kassam on Scribd
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