TWEET NOTHINGS: TO EDIT OR NOT TO EDIT

“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.” — Mark Zuckerberg, last week

The news keeps passing us by. We set out to write about presidential tweets concerning mail-in voting, then we set out to write about presidential tweets about an old conspiracy theory involving Joe Scarborough, then Friday morning came and Twitter was labeling another presidential tweet about rioters in Minnesota.

Suffice it to say that last week, Twitter took its first steps toward correcting the president of the United States, by labeling his tweets and linking to fact-checking stories. And a dust-up turned into a full-blown storm.

Somebody once said that social media has transformed information like nothing since a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

When it comes to the sharing of information, the world has been turned upside down three times: With the invention of the written word, when you could pass information through time. With the invention of the printing press, when you could pass information cheaply. And with the invention of the Internet, when you could talk to the world with minimum effort.

But while social media platforms have become powerful, those running them cannot be editors.

These are said to be the 26 words that created the Internet: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” That’s the nut graph of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

To translate from the legalese: Social media platforms, if they don’t want to be held responsible for the things people put on the Internet, must act as bulletin boards, not newspapers. A bulletin board doesn’t edit what people tack onto it. It just is. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out this past week, without those 26 words, Yelp could be sued by every business that gets a bad review.

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can’t be newspapers even if they wanted to. There aren’t enough people to take the editing jobs.

But Twitter is trying: At least when it comes to one particular person in Washington. Twitter calls this fact-checking. But bulletin boards don’t fact-check. A court might rule that what the company is doing is really editing. And, as an Arkansas governor once said, that could open a whole box of Pandoras.

Do Twitter’s minders want to be journalists and publishers? We know a little something about the business. Journalists and editors fact-check, gather information from various sources, figure out what’s important, lede with the good stuff, try to be fair, correct mistakes, and — this is where Twitter should pay attention — can be held responsible for what’s published. Journalists don’t have this bulletin-board immunity that was written into the law for social media. We could be taken to court, and sometimes are.

If the would-be publishers at Twitter want to edit, they should give up the immunity in section 230 and take responsibility for things on their platform.

This isn’t just the view of stuffy old pointy-headed newspaper types. Mark Zuckerberg was on television last week, too, giving his opinion on the matter: “I don’t think that Facebook or Internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth. Political speech is one of the most sensitive parts in a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians say.”

Twitter should remain an electronic bulletin board, a policy that has got it this far. Or maybe someone could just put in a call to Mark Zuckerberg, and get a copy of his company’s policies. Elsewise, the people at Twitter are going to be chasing around a lot of Pandoras.