Twitter Is Digging Its Own Grave

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/05/28/twitter-digging-grave/

As John discussed yesterday, President Trump is allegedly preparing some
sort of executive order that would clamp down on Twitter and potentially
other social media outlets. This is apparently a move in response to the
company’s decision to start “fact-checking” some of the President’s tweets
and flagging them as being content of dubious accuracy.

Whether or not this is something that the White House is even able to do
will likely be a subject of debate until the courts settle the matter, but
that’s hardly the key issue at hand. At National Review, David Harsanyi
wrote at length about the folly of Twitter deciding to jump into the
business of fact-checking and flagging certain bits of content and not
others. He notes that politics is rarely a dispute over facts, but rather
values, dooming such fact-checking efforts to wind up being viewed as
partisan harassment.

Once Twitter begins tagging some tweets and not others with “what you need
to know,” it will be staking out partisan positions. The Trump tweets that
precipitated its first fact-check are a good example of this. It would
have been far more reasonable for the social-media giant to label Trump’s
ugly and slanderous tweets about Joe Scarborough as misleading. Instead,
Twitter decided to inaugurate its policy by alleging that Trump had
dishonestly claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to “a Rigged
Election.”

As I said, what Harsanyi is talking about is the danger of blurring facts
with values as they engage in this fact-checking process. That’s a valid
point to be sure, and this activity will only serve to paint Twitter even
further into a liberal corner in the eyes of the public. But as I see it,
even that isn’t the main issue to be concerned with here.

The real bottom line is that Twitter could have avoided all of this by
remaining a platform, as I’ve been saying for years. As long as Twitter
simply provided users with accounts and let them tweet what they wish
without comment, they would be acting essentially as the 21st century
equivalent of a corkboard in a college dormitory. If someone posts
something offensive, the fault lies with the person pinning up the
offending material, not the manufacturer of the corkboard.

Yes, there would be exceptions. Users violating the law by either posting
child pornography, clearly slanderous or libelous defamations or similar
offenses would probably place the legal burden on the company to quickly
delete the offending content and cancel accounts to the best of their
ability. But beyond that, they should be in the clear.

Now, however, they have claimed the title of “content provider” by
providing editing services to tweets based on their own judgment. And that
means they’re responsible for every single tweet that sees the light of
day. They are no longer the innocent providers of access to a popular
social media outlet. They are publishers, determining what viewers will or
won’t see and how the message will be shaped. There are literally hundreds
of millions of tweets far “worse” than Donald Trump’s that go up every day
and they won’t be able to police them all. And that opens them up to a
full range of possible legal problems.

Twitter could have stayed on the sideline and avoided this trap. If they
really think that the President’s tweets are so misleading or terrible,
they could have let the community make that decision and essentially leave
Trump free to hoist himself on his own petard. But now that they’ve put on
their editor’s hat, a new game is afoot. And I doubt they’re going to
enjoy it.



--
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.

Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump has boosted the economy, reduced illegal immigration,
appointed dozens of judges and created jobs.

Senile loser and NAMBLA supporter Nancy Pelosi got "Trumped" on February
5, 2020. "President Trump, Not Guilty."