The fight between Twitter and Donald Trump keeps escalating. Days after Twitter drew the president’s ire by using a fact-checking label to one of his tweets– triggering a retaliatory executive order from Trump– the platform went even further. On Friday morning, it flagged a Trump tweet for violating its rules and carried out procedures to keep it from going viral, while keeping the tweet up in the name of public interest. It’s a move that attempts to strike a thoughtful balance. It likewise gets Twitter much deeper into an untidy dispute that there may be no simple way out of.
The tweet that lastly crossed Twitter’s line came simply after midnight on Friday early morning, in action to the escalating riots in Minneapolis following the obvious murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white policeman. Trump suggested that he might release the National Guard and warned that “when the robbery starts, the shooting starts,” an expression attributed to Walter Headley, a Miami police chief in the 1960 s who extolled utilizing “authorities cruelty” versus rioters. Twitter quickly covered Trump’s tweet with a label warning that it violated a guideline against glorifying violence. Users needed to click through to see the contents, and could not reply to it, like it, or retweet it without adding remark.
While Twitter very first recommended it might take such a step nearly a year ago, this was the very first time it applied a label to a presidential tweet. Predictably, the move only enraged Trump and his allies more. It also didn’t please numerous Trump critics, who have long called for Twitter to take stronger actions, like suspending his account While it may appear like a half-measure, Twitter’s decision is less arbitrary, and more rational, than it might appear.
Understanding what Twitter did requires understanding the interaction of two separate business policies. First, Twitter found that Trump’s tweet violated its rule against “glorification of violence,” which targets content that might motivate real-world violent acts, especially against minorities. Ordinarily Twitter policy would determine the elimination of the tweet and short-term suspension of the offending account, neither of which occurred to Trump. That’s where the 2nd policy can be found in. Last June, Twitter carved out a “public interest exception” in which tweets that breach the rules can stay up, subject to a notification like the one placed on Trump’s tweet today. The exception only uses to government authorities or prospects for office with more than 100,000 followers and verified accounts. According to the policy, the objective is to flag hazardous product while maintaining Twitter as “a place
Find Out More
