Twitter flags Donald Trump tweet over Minneapolis riots for ‘glorifying violence’
A post by Donald Trump over riots in Minneapolis has been flagged by Twitter. It comes after the US President signed an executive order to make social media giants more accountable.
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Twitter has flagged a Donald Trump tweet over riots in Minneapolis over a death in police custody as “glorifying violence”.
“ … These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” Trump’s tweet read.
Twitter added that it may be in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible.
It comes after the president signed an executive order removing special legal liability protections for social media companies after Twitter infuriated him by pasting fact-check alerts on his tweets.
As he signed the order, Mr Trump declared his action was designed to check the power of “a small handful of powerful social media monopolies”.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced in American history,” Mr Trump.
“A small handful of powerful social media monopolies had unchecked power to censure, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”
He said social media companies had vast power that newspapers and “traditional forms of communication’ could only dream of.
“We can’t let this continue to happen, it’s very, very unfair. This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. “Social media companies have vastly more power in the United States than newspapers, they’re by far more rich than any other traditional forms of communication.”
The President said that social media companies that engaged in “censoring or any political conduct” would no longer be protected from accountability, adding that companies like Twitter “enjoy an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform — which they are not”.
“My executive order further instructed the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices,” the President said.
The order directs federal agencies to look at whether they can place new regulations on the tech giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.
“There’s no precedent in American history for so small a number of corporations to control so large a sphere of human interaction,” Mr Trump said, accusing Twitter of making “editorial decisions”.
“As president, I’m not allowing the American people to be bullied by these giant corporations. Many people have wanted this to be done by presidents for a long time,” he said.
“I’ve been called by Democrats that want to do this and so I think you could possibly have a bipartisan situation.”
When asked by a reporter he would quit Twitter, the president said, “If you weren’t fake. I would do it in a heartbeat. If we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat. There’s nothing I’d rather do than get rid of my own Twitter account.”
TWITTER RUSHES TO APPLY MORE FACT-CHECK LABELS
Twitter added new fact-checking labels to hundreds of tweets as the White House moved to cut legal protections shielding social media from being held accountable for content on their platforms.
Mr Trump has threatened to “close down” social media sites which censor the opinions of conservative commentators and figures.
The move comes days after Twitter began fact-checking some of his tweets. It was later revealed the fact checker was aggressively anti-Republican, further infuriating the Trump camp.
Twitter appended fact-checking labels for the first time to two of Mr Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots, refuting their accuracy. In response, Mr Trump accused Twitter of stifling speech and declared that he would put a stop to the interference.
Since then, White House officials have drafted an executive order that would make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they move to suspend users or delete posts.
A Twitter spokeswoman said that the tweets modified contained “potentially misleading content” and that the fact-checking was consistent with the company’s approach this month.
Twitter boss Jack Dorsey said he would not back down from the fact-checking effort. “We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, President Trump attacked the “hater” Twitter fact-checker who “called his team ‘NAZIS’ and donated to Hillary Clinton.”
Mr Trump slammed Twitter after the social media platform’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, called the President’s team “actual Nazis” in a resurfaced tweet.
Mr Trump wrote to Twitter: “So ridiculous to see Twitter trying to make the case that Mail-In Ballots are not subject to FRAUD.
“How stupid, there are examples, & cases, all over the place.
“Our election process will become badly tainted & a laughing-stock all over the World. Tell that to your hater @yoyoel.”
Yoel Roth’s tweets resurfaced after Twitter for the first time prompted readers to check facts in tweets sent by Trump, warning his claims about mail-in ballots were false and had been debunked by fact-checkers.
Roth also once referred to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “bag of farts” and donated to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.
On January 22, 2017 Roth tweeted: “The ‘you are not the right kind of feminist’ backlash to yesterday’s marches has begun. Did we learn nothing from this election?”
That same day, Roth also wrote to Twitter: “Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
At the moment, the online social world is largely not held to account for much of the content on their websites.
The working executive order, which cites Twitter by name, would encourage the Federal Trade Commission to take action against companies that engage in “deceptive” acts of communication.
The order would also create a working group of state attorneys general to review relevant state statutes.
“This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!” Trump tweeted.
ZUCKERBERG DEFENDS SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP
Facebook chief executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said censoring a platform would not be the “right reflex” for a government worried about censorship.
“I’ll have to understand what they actually would intend to do, but in general I think a government choosing to censor a platform because they’re worried about censorship doesn’t exactly strike me as the right reflex there,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Fox News Channel.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the First Amendment of the US Constitution limits any action Trump could take to regulate social media platforms.
Separately, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals in Washington on Wednesday upheld the dismissal of a suit brought by a conservative group and right-wing YouTube personality against Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple alleging they conspired to suppress conservative political views.
Trump’s latest dispute with social media emerged after Twitter on Tuesday for the first time attached a warning to some of his tweets prompting readers to fact check the president’s claims.
In the tweets tagged by Twitter, Trump made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting. Trump falsely claims that mail-in ballots lead to vote fraud and ineligible voters getting ballots.
Asked during Twitter’s annual meeting on Wednesday why the company decided to affix the label to Trump’s mail-in ballot tweets, General Counsel Sean Edgett said decisions about handling misinformation are made as a group.
“We have a group and committee of folks who take a look at these things and make decisions on what’s getting a lot of visibility and traction …”, he said.
TRUMP SAYS HE’LL ‘CLOSE DOWN’ SOCIAL MEDIA OVER TWITTER WAR
US President Donald Trump has threatened to “close down” social media outlets he claims are “silencing conservative voices” as his feud with Twitter escalated over the “fact-checking” row.
The president is furious after Twitter this week for the first time called out one of his tweets, warning followers his claims about mail-in ballots are false and have been debunked by fact checkers.
In a tweet responding to the company’s move, Trump accused the company of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” he said.
.@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
But he upped the ante Wednesday US time when he said “we will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this (silencing conservative voices) to happen”.
The row started after Twitter placed a blue exclamation mark notification on the president’s tweet, prompting readers to “get the facts about mail-in ballots” and directed them to a page with news articles and information about the claims aggregated by Twitter staffers.
Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
Mr Trump, who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter, had claimed in tweets earlier in the day that mail-in ballots would be “substantially fraudulent” and result in a “rigged election.”
He also singled out the governor of California over the issue, although the state is not the only one to use mail-in ballots.
“Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,” said a headline at the top of the page, followed by a “what you need to know” section correcting three false or misleading claims made in the tweets.
Twitter confirmed this was the first time it had applied a fact-checking label to a tweet by the president, in an extension of its new “misleading information” policy introduced to combat misinformation about the coronavirus.
“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” said Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
The president has long used Twitter as a platform to spread abuse, conspiracy theories, false information and insults to his 80 million followers.
For years before being elected in 2016, he built his political brand by supporting the “birther” lie that Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was not born in the United States and therefore was not eligible to be president.
And on Tuesday he ignited a storm with an attempted character assassination of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough by spreading the baseless rumour he murdered an aide.
Twitter, perhaps fearing a clash with one of its most influential users, had previously held out against calls to act.
The tweets in question violated a recently expanded Twitter policy, according the San Francisco-based company.
“In serving the public conversation, our goal is to make it easy to find credible information on Twitter and to limit the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content,” head of site integrity Yoel Roth and global public policy director Nick Pickles said when the change was announced.
WIDOWER BEGS TWITTER TO INTERVENE
Twitter’s decision comes as Trump, already facing US economic calamity and 100,000 deaths from coronavirus as well as sinking re-election polls, received a storm of backlash over his pushing of the Scarborough conspiracy theory.
The entirely evidence-free story claims that Scarborough killed a woman he was having an affair with in 2001, when he was a Republican congressman and she was one of his staffers.
Trump pushed the story over the weekend. On Tuesday, he was at it again, tweeting: “The opening of a Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough”.
“So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?” he wrote.
The deceased woman, Lori Klausutis, was found by investigators to have died after hitting her head during a fall in Scarborough’s office, triggered by an abnormal heart rhythm.
Scarborough went on to become a prominent media personality, strongly critical of Trump, and is co-host of the Morning Joe show on MSNBC with his wife Mika Brzezinski, whom Trump calls “low I.Q. Crazy Mika.” Klausutis’ widower, Timothy Klausutis, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him to delete Trump’s “vicious lie.” “I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife and perverted it for perceived political gain,” he wrote in a letter published by The New York Times.
Timothy Klausutis, the widower of Lori Klausutis, has written to Jack Dorsey asking him to delete tweets by President Trump spreading a debunked conspiracy theory about his late wife’s death and @JoeNBC
— Yashar Ali 😠(@yashar) May 26, 2020
His letter is heartbreaking@karaswisher reports https://t.co/bcCw3E895f pic.twitter.com/rHHL7XcxUu
When asked about the letter, Trump told reporters at the White House: “I’m sure ultimately they want to get to the bottom of it and it’s a very serious situation.” He added: “As you know, there is no statute of limitations.” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said during a CNN interview on Tuesday that Twitter and other social media platforms should “say it’s not true” when misleading statements are broadcast.
Asked about the fallout from the Scarborough tweets, a Twitter spokesman said “we are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.” “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”
Originally published as Twitter flags Donald Trump tweet over Minneapolis riots for ‘glorifying violence’
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