Trump's Tweets Force Twitter Into a High-Wire Act

Trump's Tweets Force Twitter Into a High-Wire Act

4 years ago
Anonymous $-9GJQVHNr8

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-twitter-fight-label-moderation/

The feud between Twitter and Donald Trump keeps escalating. Days after Twitter drew the president’s ire by applying a fact-checking label to one of his tweets—prompting a retaliatory executive order from Trump—the platform went even further. On Friday morning, it flagged a Trump tweet for violating its rules and implemented measures to keep it from going viral, while keeping the tweet up in the name of public interest. It’s a move that attempts to strike a thoughtful balance. But it also gets Twitter deeper into a messy conflict that there may be no easy way out of.

The tweet that finally crossed Twitter’s line came just after midnight on Friday morning, in response to the escalating riots in Minneapolis following the apparent murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer. Trump suggested that he might deploy the National Guard and warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase attributed to Walter Headley, a Miami police chief in the 1960s who bragged about using “police brutality” against rioters. Twitter soon covered up Trump’s tweet with a label warning that it violated a rule against glorifying violence. Users had to click through to see the contents, and couldn’t reply to it, like it, or retweet it without adding comment.