It's Time to Stop Pretending Twitter is Neutral

 

By John Daniel Davidson
TheFederalist.com

Twitter’s decision this week to append a disclaimer to President Trump’s tweets about the risks of mail-in ballot fraud should be enough, at long last, for us to dispense with the fiction that Twitter is nothing more than a neutral platform.

It’s not, it never has been, and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

Set aside the relative merits of Trump’s comments and the entire debate about whether mass voting by mail is a good idea, because that’s not what’s important here. By stepping in to flag Trump’s tweet with a warning label and a link so users can “get the facts” about mail-in ballots (which ironically links to a CNN article by Chris Cillizza), Twitter abandoned any claim it had to being a neutral facilitator. It crossed over, in other words, from being a supposedly unbiased social media platform to being a traditional publisher—in this case, a publisher with a very clear editorial position.

This has been true for some time now. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley is politically progressive and, as Vox reported Wednesday, its top executives are working hard to elect presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The only difference now is that Twitter decided to make it bone-crushingly obvious. Social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google have been censoring and editorializing for years under the absurd pretext that they were just enforcing their own “community guidelines,” not weighing in on the merits of what their users were saying or embedding their own biases into the site’s rules. Who writes and enforces these community guidelines? People like Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, whose anti-Trump tweets from 2016 and 2017 resurfaced recently. Roth called Trump and his officials “ACTUAL NAZIS,” compared Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to a “bag of farts,” and implied that Trump supporters are racists.

What changed this week is that Twitter essentially came out and admitted these biases, discarding the façade of a neutral platform. The company itself, it turns out, has a point of view—in this case, about absentee voting—and it is willing to push that point of view on its users, not just by employing people like Roth to write and enforce its rules, but by explicitly fact-checking the President of the United States.

By doing this, Twitter hasn’t just waded into politics in an overt way, it has exposed the fiction at the heart of what social media companies are: they’re not neutral platforms, they’re biased, and like their peer organizations in the mainstream media, they’re overwhelmingly biased against conservatives and in favor of progressives.

Twitter Needs To Be Held To The Same Standards As Traditional Publishers

Here’s why that’s a big deal. For decades, social media companies have wanted to have it both ways. They wanted to be able to enjoy liability protections that traditional publishers don’t have while censoring opinions they don’t like and promoting those they do.

They’ve been able to do this in part thanks to federal law. Back in the late 1990s when the internet was young, Congress exempted Internet companies from liability for publishing things that were inaccurate or potentially libelous, so long as they were uploaded by a third party.

Specifically, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, protects companies like Twitter from being sued for allowing users to post crazy conspiracy theories, malicious lies, and outright falsehoods.

That’s why, for example, you’ll occasionally see completely false news stories on Twitter like this one from December 2017, in which CNN claimed Donald Trump Jr. had been tipped off about hacked Wikileaks documents before they were made public:

(Contra CNN, there was no story here at all. Trump Jr. had simply gotten an email from someone telling him about Wikileaks documents that had already been released. CNN chalked it up to an honest mistake.)