Mad King sends friend-turned-enemy to dungeon
Here are some things for which social media is responsible: Bullying and shaming which have contributed to adolescent suicide; data breaches which released the personal records of millions of Americans to bad actors; Russian influence specialists posing as Americans and being able to circulate damaging lies during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Here is what finally brought the hammer down on social media:
Getting on Donald Trump’s big fat nerves.
On Thursday, the Mad King took a moment out from brandishing his crossbow at concubines and gorging on unplucked pheasants to issue an executive order. As of this writing, some of the details remain murky, and my guess would be that it’s legally non-enforceable.
Not that that matters to the Mad King. You would be hard-pressed to find a human being less interested in the laws of the United States than its president. Don’t tell me drug traffickers and sex traffickers and monkey traffickers and traffickers who somehow combine all three of those things, because those people are quite keen to know what the laws are. They may break those laws, but not with reckless indifference.
What the order hopes to modify is section 230 of the (ironically named) Communications Decency Act of 1996. What that section says is that social media companies are not publishers. Words and pictures flow up onto Twitter and Facebook are seen hundreds of millions of times, but — technically — nothing is ever published. You: Why? Because the companies would collapse if they were considered to have published the libel and calumny and falsehood that surges like a mighty, brown, stinking river through social media.
You: But shouldn’t they be held responsible?
Yes. But also no. The problem is: we all love having this place where we can post videos of terrible social injustice or pictures of how we folded our Tshirts the way Marie Kondo says to.
If people could sue these companies every time they were slandered or otherwise harmed on the platforms, the companies could no longer operate the way they currently do, by which I mean “free of charge.”
Their argument is: if you want to have social media available to do all the things you enjoy doing, you have to be willing to let them display (but not publish, apparently) all kinds of perfidious and despicable things that substantially worsen the quality of life.
This is what’s known as a devil’s bargain.
In a sense, they really aren’t publishers. Hearst, your favorite publisher, has to pay me to write this column. Then they have to pay John Breunig to inspect it for lies and calumny and remove all exclamation points. Then they have to pay the big boss Wendy Metcalfe to call up Breunig and demand to know why there’s no “u” in “favorite.” (Metcalfe is from Canada, where they spell everything wrong.) And so on. It gets really expensive to publish stories you intend to stand behind.
Social media disproved Samuel Johnson’s 1776 maxim, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
It turns out that humankind is happy to provide social media with tons (or, in Canada, tonnes) of verbiage as long as it doesn’t have to be true or decent or punctuated.
Somehow, the whole shambles has rolled along for decades in a difficult balance, until the unimaginable happened:
Suddenly, one of the most perfidious, despicable, infectious, prevaricating, malignant, slime-spewing users of social media — specifically, Twitter — was the president of the United States. Which used to be a pretty respectable job if you go back a few years.
Trump has used Twitter to spread racist conspiracy theories, to insult and hurt people, to falsely claim that millions of people voted illegally for Clinton in the 2016 election and to insert the word “covfefe” (In Canada, “couvfefre”) into the English language.
None of that seemed to bother Twitter. But the Mad King conceived a special hatred for one funloving couple. You could see it as early as June 2017 in a two-part Trump tweet: “Heard poorly rated Morning Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low IQ Crazy Mika along with Psycho Joe came ... to Mara-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
I think we can all agree that there’s nothing deranged or mentally unbalanced about that.
Trump never let go and recently, he has begun to tweet about Joe Scarborough in a way that, almost impossibly, falls below the floor of the rat-feces-coated abyss of his regular Twitter habits.
Roughly 19 years ago, a young woman who worked for Scarborough, then a congressman, fainted (because of an undiagnosed heart condition), hit her head on a desk and died. Her name was Lori Klausutis, and Trump has been pounding away on Twitter, of late, at the idea that Scarborough had her murdered.
Her widower wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and implored him, on behalf of the whole family including her parents, to take these horrifying tweets down, and Dorsey did so immediately.
Not really. Dorsey didn’t do anything. Twitter issued a terse statement that included the words: “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies ...” to address “things like this going forward.” We can all agree that when somebody uses the phrase “existing product features” they’re really acknowledging the pain of another person.
But at roughly the same time, Twitter flagged some Trump tweets about the fraudulence of voting by mail. All Twitter did was put a little blue exclamation mark — take that, Breunig! — at the bottom of the tweets with a link to: “Get the facts about mailin ballots.”
That’s all. No suppression. No deletion. Even so, Twitter was denounced by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who explained that he consulted with the Dippin’ Dot that functions in place of his immortal soul and still believes that social media platforms should not be “arbiters of truth.”
And now the Mad King wants to perforate the umbrella of protections they have long enjoyed.
Which wouldn’t be a terrible idea if it were done for just about any other reason.