What Twitter isn’t

Sen. Ted Cruz brought out the kebab skewers to grill Twitter’s Jack Dorsey on Wednesday, and we can’t say it wasn’t warranted. When it temporarily banned the sharing of a ballyhooed scoop from the New York Post, Twitter made a hash of handling questionably sourced revelations. As the platform admitted the next day when reversing their judgment and changing their policies, it should’ve just appended a warning and a link to more context.

Cruz asked Dorsey whether Twitter has the power to influence elections; Dorsey said no. It was a pathetic dodge. Of course a social media behemoth that gives @realdonaldtrump the ability to communicate instantly with 87 million followers can put a finger or a hand on the scales if it wishes.

Yet Cruz himself is deeply confused. He badgers Twitter as some malign censor for daring to fiddle with political speech — which is not only its right as a private entity but its responsibility, particularly to frustrate the spread of deepfake videos, foreign disinformation or other falsehoods that undermine the democratic process.

Cruz is a leading critic of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, under which everyone from Reddit to YouTube to Craigslist to the comment section on newspaper sites is free of liability for what they enable people to post. If that provision were shredded, platforms would legally become gatekeepers of all the words and images they facilitate, essentially meaning they could not exist.

Instead, Twitter, Facebook and other networks properly enable the generally free flow of ideas — with a concomitant obligation to enforce guidelines so that vile harassment, incitement of violence and other vicious poison can’t spread frictionlessly.

Cruz and others who attack Section 230 for making platforms too open, while savaging them when they dare exercise judgment without which we’d all be sunk, refute themselves.