RTWed, 27 May 2020 13:16 UTC
© Fox Business NewsVirtual rules for virtual realities? Do they exist?
The US president has threatened to heavily regulate, or even shut down, social media platforms that "silence conservative voices"
after Twitter marked his posts with a fact-check notice implying they contained misinformation."Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservative voices," Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday.
"We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that happen again."
He went on to again decry voting by mail-in ballots, claiming that the measure would result in
"a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of ballots" if used on a large scale.
The broadside was apparently Trump's way to continue an ongoing feud with Twitter. The platform drew the ire of the president this week by
marking some of his earlier posts about mail-in ballots with a notice suggesting that readers click and get facts about the practice.Twitter has been adding such notices to tweets flagged as possibly containing falsities, so their appearance on Trump's posts was cheered by many of his opponents. Critics of the president have long been pressuring his social media platform of choice to oust him for this or that transgression for years.
Their efforts were reinvigorated recently, with
a hoax accusation that Trump had murdered a non-existent intern named Carolyn Gombell. It was started as part payback and part pressure campaign in response to Trump
suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had played a part in the death of Lori Klausutis, who worked for him as an intern during his stint in the US Congress. After the accusation, Scarborough's co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski,
said she wants to directly talk to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and
have Trump banned.
Twitter's larger crusade on misinformation has so far produced mixed results, at least as regards coronavirus conspiracy theories.
Since automated labeling was launched earlier this month, it has given numerous false positives and negatives, causing some commenters to
wonder if the system ultimately does more harm than good.
Comment: Virtues of Freedom of Speech are under attack by the self-appointed gatekeepers of virtual reality:
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."
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.
See also:
Comment: Virtues of Freedom of Speech are under attack by the self-appointed gatekeepers of virtual reality: 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.
See also: