San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mr. President: Regulate yourself, not Twitter
Perhaps it’s understandable that President Trump would be hypersensitive about being factchecked by Twitter. This is the president who has made more than 18,000 false or misleading claims since taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, according to the Washington Post tracker. But his allegation that social media is silencing conservative voices is, well, just another false claim. Six of the top 10 political publishers on Facebook lean to the right. Trump has more than 80 million Twitter followers and has sent out 52,000 unfiltered tweets.
It was Twitter’s treatment of a pair of Trump tweets that set him on a rantathon that led to a legally dubious executive order to get government into the business of regulating social media.
Twitter did not censor Trump’s tweet that contended that votebymail was fraudulent and that Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed sending ballots to “millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” That is patently false. The ballots would go only to registered voters. Twitter did not alter or delete his tweet, it merely added a link to “get the facts about mailin ballots.”
It was the first time Twitter touched a Trump tweet after being pressured for years to do something about his using the platform to spread conspiracy theories and to smear or threaten real and perceived rivals. His dark and thoroughly discredited suggestion that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough might be involved in the 2001 death of a 28yearold woman of an undisclosed heart condition was merely the latest example of Trump’s cruel recklessness. Scarborough, then a member of Congress from Florida, was 800 miles away at the time of his staffer Laurie Klausutis’ death.
And the president immediately went on rampage against social media — on social media, naturally — threatening to “strongly regulate, or close them down.”
On Thursday, Trump signed an exec
utive order that could lead to more government oversight of political speech on social media. Its main target is a 1996 federal law that gave tech companies immunity from liability for content posted by others on their sites. The provision is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially classified the interactive digital services as conduits, not publishers, of information.
Trump’s order encourages the Federal Communications Commission to reassess the scope of Section 230 and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the socialmedia companies are upholding their pledges of neutrality about incoming content. It also asked federal agencies to reconsider their advertising on social media.
Yet the notion of the U.S. government using its regulatory or financial leverage to rein in outlets it perceives as hostile to those in power is chilling indeed. There are nations that suppress online communication among their citizenry: Eritrea, North Korea, Vietnam, Iran and the “Great Firewall of China” among them.” They all lean on the power of propaganda and the threat of imprisonment against independent voices.
Does the United States of America really want to go there?
Trump’s bullying of social media is not likely to survive judicial scrutiny. Any attempt by government to interfere in private speech is certain to run afoul of the First Amendment. Also, that 1996 law was created by Congress, and any significant revision would require congressional action.
It didn’t take long for Trump to escalate his frontal challenge to Twitter. Shortly before 1 a.m. Friday, with a Minneapolis police precinct and other buildings engulfed in flames, he fired off a tweet condemning the demonstrators in allcapitalletters as “THUGS” and vowed: “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
His words were doubly incendiary. “Thugs” is often used in racially loaded ways against African Americans. The “looting starts, the shooting starts” quote was infamously invoked by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley in a December 1967 news conference as part of his threatened “crackdown on ... slum hoodlums.”
Twitter shielded the tweet from public view with a gray box, warning that it “violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence.” The tweet was not deleted, but a user would need to click on the box to view it. The tweet soon reappeared on the White House account — not Donald Trump’s personal account, but an official government account — and received the same warning label.
On Friday, Trump unconvincingly tried to insist that he was not suggesting that authorities should shoot looters, that it was “spoken as a fact, not a statement” that “looting leads to shooting.” He added that “nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media.”
So said the politician who thrives on troublemaking on Twitter with hatelaced missives on nearly a daily basis. Trump said he would leave social media “in a heartbeat” but for his ability to rebut “fake news” to a far wider audience than he ever would reach through the media.
Isn’t that the polar opposite of being silenced?
Let’s be clear: Twitter is not a public utility. It is a private enterprise. Users can decide whom to follow and what, if anything, to post. If you don’t think Twitter is fair, Mr. President, then delete your account. If you don’t want to trigger a factcheck alert, then tweet the truth.