Twitter fact-checks Trump tweet for first time

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/26/twitter-fact-checks-trump-twee.html

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He’s a liar. It’s useless to point that out because %30 of this country doesn’t care for some stupid-ass 'Merica reason. %10 just want their stock market bump, and another %10 just want abortion illegal. %50 of us are screaming like mad as we watch the ship sink with us on it.

I’ve never had a twitter account since I prefer more nuanced dialogue that doesn’t have a ASCII limitation, but I’m not part of the 30,10,10.

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I’m sure that Trump will take this feeble gesture by Twitter calmly and rationally.

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Toddlers are gonna toddle.

So much effort to delegitimize the upcoming election before it’s even here. It’s almost like he wants to keep the job for some reason. I mean sure, the golfing is great, but I can’t imagine the rest of the perks, like… leading the country to its destruction… are all that appealing.

Great flag guys. Who’s going to bother clicking it? How about also highlighting the bits that are lies? He’ll just think he’s special.

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Twitter Trial Balloon.

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in all seriousness Barr is going to suddenly announce an investigation into Twitter

and trumpkins will use whitehouse taxpayer funded lawyers to sue to have it removed

also IRS audits all around, remember he controls that too

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So, Twitter decides what are facts and what are not facts.

Hmmmmm… What could possibly tip the scales to trump?

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I assume you mean Fredo-like. If Don Jr. was a Tolkien character he’d probably be some kind of lesser goblin tasked with spreading the king’s decrees.

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It’s the least they can do. The very least. Though even that is something. I was just reading some excerpts from, of all places, a Wall Street Journal article about how Facebook’s own research showed that their algorithms were driving extremism and membership in extremist groups, and Zuckerberg himself intervened - to push to keep things as they were.

It’s almost like his ego and desire to stay out of jail are really big motivators…

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Ok Brad.

What a bearded douche bag that guy is.

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I can’t say this is worse than if they hadn’t done it, but… fuck.

You have to be very, very plugged in to this exact millisecond in history – and psychotically disconnected from every other moment in history – to not see how fucked up Twitter’s overall position is. This person has used the platform they chose to give him to spread thousands of destructive, racist, antisocial, panic-mongering, misogynistic, seditious, inhumane, stupid, dangerous and otherwise bad messages, for free, to a massive audience that wouldn’t have seen any of it otherwise. There aren’t words to express how insignificant these new puling footnotes are compared to that larger reality.

Twitter could have simply cut him off in 2015. They could have said “we are not interested in being in the Donald Turmp business”, and that would be the end of the matter. So fucking what if it’s not impartial. Twitter isn’t the phone company, it’s an experiment, and they have chosen to be an experiment in the collapse of democracy. If you seriously think this has equal weight with half-baked nineties dorm-room arguments about internet freedom, you are not hooked up right.

Does Twitter concede that Turmp’s lies and rabble-rousing are dangerous? Or do they think it’s right to go to work every day to help him do it? This a binary choice. Can we please by Christ’s wounds stop indulging excuses about it?

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If he doesn’t like it he can find another service.

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I hear gab is looking for something to boost their profile since the rest of the fediverse blocked their asses when they adopted the Mastodon software…

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He wanted to Not See it, because it was unfair to right-wing extremists.

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Yeah, there’s no way this is going to be sustainable even if Twitter doesn’t chicken out. It would take multiple full-time staffers just to stay on top of fact-checking Trump alone, and if they don’t apply the same diligence to other public figures then it’s going to raise accusations of partisanship even among reasonable people.

As you say, they should have deleted his account for violating the Terms of Service years ago. Now they’re in so deep they have nothing but a handful of terrible options to choose from.

I’m 100% serious about burning Twitter to the ground.

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Social media giants are the new Big Tobacco.

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And not just any staffers. Probably some top-notch legal talent and good researchers. (Then again, think on how much they’ve made from Trump on their platform.)

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Can’t they simply just apply this label to everything he tweets? Maybe have a 'bot go back and do it to all his earlier tweets? As far as I can tell, the only thing he ever tweeted that wasn’t false or misleading was “Covfefe”.

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Yet another hidden-in-plain-sight order to supporters to compromise results and create confusion in November by robbing mailboxes in ‘brown’ neighborhoods and by creating/stuffing ballots. Think it won’t happen? Think that even one incident of this won’t be spun and used to sow confusion and be twisted to Trump’s advantage?

Pictureaa

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