{"id":31013,"date":"2020-05-28T16:26:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-28T16:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=31013"},"modified":"2020-05-28T16:26:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T16:26:00","slug":"twitter-fact-checks-trump-but-will-it-do-any-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2020\/05\/28\/twitter-fact-checks-trump-but-will-it-do-any-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter fact-checks Trump, but will it do any good?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/em><\/strong>: I originally wrote this<\/a> for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Twitter said earlier this month that it was<\/a> making some changes to \u201climit the spread of potentially harmful or misleading content\u201d by adding warning labels to tweets, one of the most obvious questions was whether the company would apply the labels to Trump\u2019s various misinformed tweets. On Tuesday, we got the answer, when labels were added to two tweets posted to Trump\u2019s account<\/a> on the topic of mail-in voting ballots. The labels appeared just below the text of the tweet<\/a>, with a hyperlink that said \u201cGet the real story on mail-in voting.\u201d The link took users to a collection of tweets with facts about the topic<\/a>, curated by Twitter staff into what the company calls a Moment. The move was greeted with cheers in some quarters<\/a>, while Trump and his supporters<\/a> \u2014 including his son Donald Jr. \u2014 angrily tweeted about how the company was clearly trying to manipulate public opinion in advance of the federal election. Trump even promised to<\/a> \u201cstrongly regulate, or close them down,\u201d despite an obvious lack of any federal ability to do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, it\u2019s a tiny victory in the ongoing battle to stamp out misinformation<\/a>\n online. After years of being accused of spreading lies, propaganda, and\n other noxious substances through its network, and of doing little to \nstop it, Twitter finally seems to be taking some baby steps towards \nresponsible curation (Facebook<\/a> said it would not take<\/a>\n similar action because it believes that \u201cpeople should be able to have a\n robust debate about the electoral process\u201d). But at the same time, \nTwitter\u2019s move is like taking a tiny drop of poison from a very large \nocean and putting a label on it saying \u201cfor more information about \npoison, click here.\u201d In fact, Twitter\u2019s decision to add this kind of \nwarning label raises as many questions as it answers. To take just one \nexample, social researchers have found that fact-checking can cause what is known as the \u201cimplied truth effect,\u201d<\/a>\n where users assume that because one specific statement has been \nfact-checked and found to be false, others that haven\u2019t been \nfact-checked must be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a number of observers pointed out<\/a> after Twitter added the label, the way that the company chose to phrase it was also imperfect. Saying \u201cGet the facts about mail-in ballots\u201d could be interpreted by some as adding weight to<\/a> the misinformation rather than debunking it. Researchers such as Whitney Phillips of Syracuse University and Joan Donovan of Harvard\u2019s Shorenstein Center often talk about the risks inherent in calling attention to misinformation, in part because doing so can amplify the incorrect info<\/a> and cause it to travel much farther than it would have otherwise. Many wondered whether Twitter users would even bother clicking on the link, let alone read the facts in the Twitter Moment. Activist Charlotte Clymer said that Twitter\u2019s label<\/a> \u201cis the most mild form of accountability\u201d imaginable. The warning doesn\u2019t say Trump is wrong or misleading people, she noted, and most people would probably scroll by without even noticing. \u201cIt\u2019s weak and cowardly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Late Wednesday, Trump told reporters flying with him on Air Force One that he would issue an executive order today<\/a>\n on social-media companies, but no details were given about what this \norder would include. It\u2019s not the first time the president has \nthreatened something of this kind: last August, the White House issued a draft executive order<\/a>\n that called on the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and \nwhen the law should protect social networks when they remove content \nfrom their services, but nothing ever came of it. A number of legal \nexperts told Associated Press that<\/a>\n his threats to \u201cregulate or shut down\u201d social-media companies are \nlikely empty. \u201cThis is an attempt by the president to, as we used to say\n in basketball, work the refs,\u201d said Jack Balkin, a Yale University law \nprofessor and First Amendment scholar. Former federal judge Michael \nMcConnell, who now heads the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, told the AP<\/a> that Trump lacks the legal power to back up his threat. \u201cHe has no such authority,\u201d he said in an email. \u201cHe is just venting.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever the likelihood of success, Trump loyalists did their best to drum up the appearance of imminent action against the company, and also singled out a Twitter employee<\/a> on the safety and security team who they blamed for the fact-checking label, digging up several of his past tweets. Republican Senator Josh Hawley published a letter he sent<\/a> to Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey saying the company\u2019s decision to \u201ceditorialize\u201d about the content of the president\u2019s tweets raises questions<\/a> about whether the company should continue to be protected from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Both Hawley\u2019s statement and a similar one<\/a> from Republican Senator Marco Rubio show a fundamental misunderstanding of what Section 230 does<\/a>, as a number of legal experts pointed out. The law was specifically designed to allow the platforms to moderate their content however they chose. Conservative regulators have been pushing to take away<\/a> this protection for some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s more on Trump and Twitter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n