The fight between Twitter and Donald Trump keeps intensifying. Days after Twitter drew the president’s ire by applying a fact-checking label to among his tweets– triggering a retaliatory executive order from Trump– the platform went even further. On Friday early morning, it flagged a Trump tweet for breaching its guidelines and implemented measures to keep it from going viral, while keeping the tweet up in the name of public interest. It’s a move that tries to strike a thoughtful balance. It also gets Twitter deeper into an unpleasant conflict that there may be no easy way out of.
The tweet that lastly crossed Twitter’s line came simply after midnight on Friday morning, in response to the escalating riots in Minneapolis following the evident murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer. Trump recommended that he might release the National Guard and warned that “when the looting begins, the shooting starts,” a phrase attributed to Walter Headley, a Miami authorities chief in the 1960 s who extolled using “cops cruelty” versus rioters. Twitter quickly covered Trump’s tweet with a label warning that it violated a guideline versus glorifying violence. Users needed to click through to see the contents, and could not respond to it, like it, or retweet it without adding remark.
While Twitter very first suggested it might take such an action almost a year ago, this was the very first time it used a label to a governmental tweet. Naturally, the move only enraged Trump and his allies more. It likewise didn’t satisfy numerous Trump critics, who have long called for Twitter to take more powerful actions, like suspending his account While it might seem like a half-measure, Twitter’s choice is less arbitrary, and more logical, than it may appear.
Comprehending what Twitter did requires understanding the interaction of two separate business policies. Twitter discovered that Trump’s tweet violated its guideline against “glorification of violence,” which targets material that might motivate real-world violent acts, particularly against minorities. Ordinarily Twitter policy would dictate the elimination of the tweet and momentary suspension of the offending account, neither of which occurred to Trump. That’s where the second policy comes in. Last June, Twitter carved out a “public interest exception” in which tweets that violate the rules can stay up, based on a notice like the one placed on Trump’s tweet this morning. The exception only uses to government authorities or candidates for workplace with more than 100,000 followers and confirmed accounts. According to the policy, the goal is to flag hazardous product while protecting Twitter as “a place
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