Twitter's screw up

Jonathon Turley:

Free speech, our defining right in the United States, seems to be dangling on social media. Twitter added warnings on tweets from President Trump, marking a major escalation of speech controls on the internet, something that has been demanded by Democrats. While the company clarified that Trump did not violate the rules, it still intervened between him and all his followers to add its own view of the truth on a political controversy.

The action against Trump on his mail voting tweets is the realization of the fear of free speech advocates. People sign up for updates from Trump, not Twitter, but the company decided to force his 80 million followers to view its own position on this issue. Imagine if a telephone company listened for errant political statements on calls to flag its business concerns.

Unfortunately, Trump added his own threat to free speech by pledging to “shut down” Twitter and others if they do not change their positions. It is akin to denouncing people without fire detectors by threatening to burn down their homes. His new executive order would seek to eliminate key liability protections for social media companies while calling for federal investigations into political bias. But without legislative support, such a crackdown on these companies is highly unlikely to succeed. However, Congress has been angling to curb online free speech for years.

Curtailing free speech has now become an article of faith in many circles. News host Don Lemon told Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey to “stop hiding behind the First Amendment” and censor Trump. Democrats such as Representative Adam Schiff sent letters to social media platforms to demand greater regulation and removal of certain statements that are seen as misleading, which many of us warned is a potential abuse of free speech. Former Vice President Joe Biden added his voice to the call this week for Twitter to remove any statements deemed to be false.

The choice to target a political statement on Twitter was no accident. This is precisely the type of statement that Democrats have been searching for years with threats of a federal takeover. During one hearing, Senator Mark Warner boomed that “the era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end.” That intolerable Wild West is the existence of an area of relatively unregulated free speech. Indeed, like those pioneers of democracy, many people have gone on social media to speak their minds openly.

That frontier of free speech may now be vanishing. On the mail voting tweets, Twitter dispensed with any discernible standard to intervene in political exchanges. Speech regulation will evidently go back in time to retroactively mark unreliable views. The website archive service called Wayback Machine claims it will label articles as “disinformation” when faced with views it deems false or misleading. Now there will be both censorship and retroactive action taken against past thoughts.

The mail voting tweets from Trump are based on a rather mainstream view of the dangers of using such a system on a large scale basis in an election. This concern was certainly raised when multiple ballots for a primary race next week were mailed mistakenly to several voters across Pittsburgh and Allegheny County in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Officials have said barcoding will prevent anyone from voting more than once.
...

Liberals hate free speech of conservatives.  They hate Fox News.  They hate any descent from their views.  Twitter allowed a Trump hater to falsely claim that there was no problem with mail-in ballots.  To call what Twitter did a fact check is laughable.  It was the opposite of a real fact check, because it was wrong on all counts.