Drawing the line online
Twitter posts warning on Trump tweet, not Facebook
OAKLAND, Calif. — President Trump posted identical messages on Twitter and Facebook this week. But while the two social platforms have very similar policies on voter misinformation and glorifying violence, they dealt with Trump’s posts very differently, proof that Silicon Valley is far from a united front when it comes to political decisions.
Twitter placed a warning label on two Trump tweets that called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and predicted problems with the November elections. It demoted and placed a stronger warning on a third tweet about Minneapolis protests that read, in part, that “when the looting starts the shooting starts.”
Facebook left the posts alone.
“Facebook doesn’t want to alienate certain communities,” said Dipayan Ghosh, codirector of the digital platforms and democracy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It doesn’t want to tick off a whole swatch of people who really believe the president and appreciate his tweets.”
Twitter, on the other hand has a history of taking stronger stances, he added, including a complete ban on political advertisements that the company announced last November.
“Our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his social network late last week.
Referring to the president’s comments about the Minneapolis protests, Zuckerberg said that he had “a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric.” But Facebook decided, he said, to keep the president’s comment’s on the site because “we read it as a warning about state action, and we think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force.”
Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that Twitter will “continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally.” But he added: “This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.'”
This is not the first time that a social media company clashed with the president. And with six months to go before the election, it won’t be the last.
“It sure looks like, in the face of pressure to follow the White House’s preferred speech policies, Facebook chose appeasement and Twitter chose to fight,” said Daphne Keller, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.
“It’s really a no-win scenario”’ for social media companies, said Patrick Hedger, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Conservatives will complain if they block or correct Trump statements. Liberals will cry foul if they don’t.”
Hedger also noted that “the unmoderated world does exist,” pointing to Gab.com, which has become a haven for extremist views. “The unmoderated internet is not a pretty place,” he said.