Total and complete…maybe
“Misleading” is a polite way of putting it.
Twitter on Sunday added a warning label to a tweet from President Donald Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus and said he is no longer contagious.
Trump tweeted on Sunday that he received a “total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday.”
“That means I can’t get it (immune), and can’t give it,” the president added. “Very nice to know!!!”
So he’s admitting that he didn’t “know” that before and thus knew he was being reckless with other people’s lives. Surprise surprise.
The tweet contains “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19,” the Twitter label says. It remains accessible because “Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest.”
It’s potentially harmful in encouraging others to be reckless with other people’s lives. Trump is like a chain reaction of danger to others.
White House physician Sean Conley said in a statement Saturday evening that Trump “is no longer considered a transmission risk to others.”
Considered by whom, though? Conley is so weaselly that it’s hard to see that statement as reliable.
Trump’s flagged tweet came after a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, during which the president first claimed to be “immune” to the coronavirus.
“It looks like I’m immune for, I don’t know, maybe a long time, maybe a short time,” Trump told Bartiromo. “It could be a lifetime. Nobody really knows.”
That’s interesting because his tweet is much less cautious.
I’m not at all happy that Twitter has reached the point where they think they can get away with flagging tweets made by the President of the US. We might think that he’s a weapons-grade cock-end, but he is still the President. If they can get away with censoring the President, how long is going to be before they decide that can get away with censoring J K Rowling or anyone else that doesn’t toe the Official Woke line on feminist thought?
Trump is telling life-threatening lies about the virus. Yes, life-threatening lies do need to be corrected. If Rowling were saying, for instance, that trans people are spreading the virus, I would think Twitter should flag that too.
But, as you have tirelessly (and quite admirably) documented, there are plenty of people who insist that JKR is telling life-threatening lies about trans people.
Somehow I don’t think flagging a tweet as misleading is the same as censoring. It’s in the same camp as fact-checking, a time-honored tradition in journalism.
MMM,
Are you new to the internet? Web sites/forums/networks have been moderating and banning people forever.
You know what happens when one doesn’t? You get 4chan. (Or 8chan or whatever they’re up to now.)
Except that the latter isn’t some hypothetical future danger that may or may not ensue further down the slippery slope unless Trump’s dangerous and malicious lies are allowed to stand uncorrected today, is it. The least awful thing Trump has tweeted in his life is still orders of magnitude more awful than the things for which gender-critical feminists are already having their tweets – or even their whole accounts – not just flagged, but taken down permanently. So what you seem to be saying is that the astronomical double-standard already applied in Trump’s favor isn’t astronomical enough.
Trump isn’t being censored. A tiny part of his content is being flagged as inaccurate because it is unambiguously harmful to his millions of followers. These two things are very different indeed.
I’m unhappy that we allowed Twitter and the other social media platforms to become so ubiquitous and powerful but since we did those platforms have a moral obligation to reduce harm by policing content. Like Michael I’m not at all pleased that the social media companies are the ones making these decisions, especially since we can all plainly see that they get it wrong much of the time: threats and dogpiles are just fine on Twitter if the people being threatened and piled-upon are women but there’s a hair ban-trigger when it’s certain other groups.
But this is what we wanted. It’s what we asked for. Well, not me, I’ve been screaming about this for years, but collectively we walked into this situation with our eyes closed and our fingers in our ears. There are practical things we can do about it through collective action and I argue that it’s vital and urgent.
But surely, Michael, that moral obligation must be applied to Trump at least as much as to everyone else because Trump must be held more accountable than anyone else. He can do more damage. As we have plainly seen, over and over again. The president is not more important than anyone else. He’s not immune to criticism, censure, mockery or – above all – fact-checking. A world where he was – the world he most definitely wants – would be a lot more frightening even than this one.
latsot,
Agreed — the problem isn’t “internet companies get to moderate content (or ‘censor’ if you insist on that term),” it’s that a few internet companies have become so dominant.
But that’s not really that new a problem. I grew up in a city (not a small town, mind you, but an actual city) that had one daily newspaper (part of a chain owned by a large corporation) and where the two local television stations, and all but one of the non-government radio stations, were owned by the same individual. So essentially one large out-of-town corporation and one man controlled the local media. The average citizen could only be heard if the newspaper agreed to publish your letter to the editor, or one of the radio or television talk shows took your call.
Yes, there were laws and licensing regulations supposed to prevent this kind of media consolidation, but they worked about as well as you’d expect. This wasn’t even that unusual a situation — I’m sure many of you have similar stories. I don’t know to what extent they played favorites in local politics, but they certainly had the ability to do so if they wished.
Having the ability to (at least potentially) get your voice heard by thousands is really a relatively new and remarkable thing. It hasn’t ushered in a golden age of democracy as some of the techno-optimists of the early days of the internet believed, and there’s certainly work to be done, but I think we shouldn’t lose sight of how much things have changed.
MIchael Mason,
Sorry if my initial comment @5 was unduly snarky. I tend to have two modes of commenting: long-winded and tedious, or brief and sarcastic.
Screechy,
That’s a good point and serves to demonstrate that we ought to have learned some lessons from the past.
There are differences with the current situation, though, which are mostly to do with scale. I won’t bore everyone, but the scale of services like Twitter means that they are unable – even in principle – to enforce even their own rules in a fair and consistent way. The global nature of the services raises other practical problems, many of which are due to their eagerness to capitulate with oppressive governments in the screwing over of people.
Before I bore everyone entirely, I will stress again that there are ways we can fix social media, with or without help from governments and legislation. The technical side is simple enough, the hard part is convincing enough people to care. I’m trying…