So earlier this week the President of the United States took to Twitter to baselessly accuse a private citizen of murder (as one does, amidst a pandemic that has claimed 100,000 American lives and throttled the economy).
The calls for Twitter to ban/censure/otherwise punish Trump came swiftly. And in true Twitter fashion, the company did . . . something entirely different. It tentatively waded into ANOTHER Trump Twitter Shitshow — this one involving the Umber Menace inveigling about the perils of voting by mail. Twitter decided THIS was the fight it was going to take, appending a little linked tooltip disclaimer to the offending tweets:
This is a form of content moderation, and obviously far short of a takedown or account suspension. And as “flags for offensive content” go, this is pretty mild. Hell, squint at it just a little and it looks like an endorsement of Trump’s claim.
But Trump, naturally, took offense:
“Strongly regulate or close them down?” What even IS this noise?
At one time, Republicans cared about the First Amendment. They noted, rightly, that corporations have free speech rights. And you know what? If social media platforms were actually silencing conservative voices, REAL conservatives would say “So what? The government’s got no role to play there.”
Instead, we’ve now got Trump doing his snowflake-swagger routine, echoing the bad faith nonsense that Republican Senators have been spewing for months:
I’ve written at length about why this argument is abject nonsense, and why threats to change CDA 230 aren’t going to achieve the ends Republicans like Rubio purport to be seeking. But here we are — it looks to be a long summer of escalating stupidity.