Trump’s Attacks on Twitter Are Part of a Plot to Keep Social Media in His Pocket – Mother Jones
▻https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/05/donald-trump-attacks-twitter
If you’re a Twitter user, by now you’ve probably seen the news. After years of complaints about President Donald Trump broadcasting falsehoods over the platform, the company finally took a small step to mitigate his misinformation. On Tuesday, the social media giant appended a “get the facts” link to two Trump tweets in which he claimed that mail-in-ballots would result in fraudulent election outcomes.
The link led to a page with several bullet points that refute the president—who, to be clear, was not telling the truth—along with links to reputable news stories providing context and correct information.
Since 2016, the social media companies have taken some steps to rein in the worst behavior on their services, including setting up guardrails specifically related to the disinformation around voting. Facebook banned false information and suppressive content on elections in ads. Twitter rolled out its election integrity policy in January. Meanwhile, Trump, his campaign, and Republican lawmakers have engaged in a campaign to keep those guardrails off. Part of this pressure campaign is backed by the threat of regulation. The Justice Department under Attorney General Bill Barr is overseeing anti-trust investigations into major social media companies, and Republican lawmakers claiming, without evidence, conservative censorship have proposed regulations.
And if such policies are ever acted upon, as they were Tuesday, the claims of bias will resonate because Trump has already created a context in which his supporters believe social media is working against them. I wrote about this how this strategy has been deployed in my recent profile of Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager
These tweets do exactly what the campaign has prepared to do in its battle with social media companies: Trump accuses them of bias, threatens regulation, and then goes ahead and repeats the false claim he was aiming to spread, in this case that voting by mail will delegitimize the election. He reminds Twitter of his power over the platform, then dares it to once again fact-check his false claim. How will Twitter respond?
We already know how the company and its peers have responded to this exact treatment over the last several years. Caught between civil rights pushing to get voter suppression and hate off the platforms and Trump and his crew on the right pushing to let repugnant content stay up, the platforms have largely catered to Trump’s concerns.
Facebook, for example, now allows politicians to lie in their posts and ads. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had internally determined that its algorithms increased polarization and radicalization but chose to do nothing, largely because of pressure from Republicans. And this Tuesday, the same day Twitter finally put its “get the facts” tag on Trump’s tweets, it refused to take down his tweets accusing the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of involvement in the 2001 death of an employee. The president continued making the claim on Twitter on Wednesday.
Facebook, in particular, has repeatedly shown itself to be more interested in pleasing conservatives than cracking down on extremists using its platform. While the company’s own content policies ban hate groups, for example, just last week, a report by the Tech Transparency Project found 153 white supremacist groups’ pages on Facebook. (Many were removed after the report’s publication.)
With Trump reportedly growing more worried about his re-election prospects and Election Day in less than six months, his campaign is expected to unleash its war chest. That will include massive spending, particularly on Facebook, where he’ll seek to connect with his audience without filter by the platform. His attack on Twitter is just the latest chapter in a years-long campaign to work the refs to make sure the social media giants feel they have no other option.