Twitter CEO Tries To Explain Labeling Trump's Tweets, Ends Up Digging Himself In Even Deeper
Some Jack Dorsey tweets aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
The CEO of tech giant Twitter, finding himself in a hole after his company took the unusual move of “fact checking” two of President Donald Trump’s posts on Tuesday and labeling them as misleading, tried to defend himself Wednesday with an explanation of the company’s decision.
Unfortunately for Dorsey, the explanation was so weak it only got him in deeper — and showed Americans how deeply dishonest the opposition to Trump actually is.
Dorsey’s Twitter post apparently came in response to criticism by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — of all people — who told Fox News host Dana Perino in an interview to be aired Thursday that even giant tech companies shouldn’t set themselves up as judges of truth and falsehood.
“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” Zuckerberg said, according to Fox News.
“Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that,” he said.
First, Dorsey sounded just a little too defensive to be believable.
This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.
— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020
Then, his actual explanation simply wasn’t believable at all.
Twitter had taken its action, he wrote in a tweet, because Trump’s tweets about the potential for fraud in mail-in voting — Democrats’ latest holy grail — implied that Americans didn’t need to register to vote in order to receive a mail-in ballot.
Per our Civic Integrity policy (https://t.co/uQ0AoPtoCm), the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.
— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020
“Per our Civic Integrity policy (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-policy…), the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on@realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.”
That’s actually not a bad excuse. An exceptionally naive — or intellectually dishonest — liberal might even take it as a responsible decision on the part of an upstanding company that was intent on making sure American voters have the information they need to fully participate in the world’s oldest democratic republic.
The problem is, the evidence indicates that’s not at all what Twitter was objecting to about the president’s tweets.
In reality, the company placed a link on Trump’s tweets that led to a note with the headline: “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”
The note cited two rabidly anti-Trump news outlets — CNN and The Washington Post — to back up its criticism.
It didn’t say a word about voter registration.
But there is literally nothing “unsubstantiated” about Trump’s statement. Logic and common sense say mail-in votes are more open to questions about fraud than the normal, in-person kind. (Who’s actually casting the vote? Are they really acting of their own volition? There’s no interference anywhere?)
In fact, back in 2012, The New York Times published an article demonstrating conclusively that mail-in and absentee ballots were extraordinarily open to fraud.
(The Times was worried then that mailed-in absentee ballots skewed Republican. Now that it’s a Democrat issue and Trump is against vote-by-mail, The Gray Lady isn’t so concerned.)
It was only late Wednesday that Dorsey’s company published its “voter confusion” explanation.
We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020
“We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy,” a Twitter Safety post stated. “We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.”
That’s not bad, it’s just more than 24 hours too late.
It sounds less like the reasoned explanation for Twitter’s course of action and more — much more — like an excuse someone came up with to deal with the heat that came down from the company’s inexcusable decision to push itself into the election process by smearing the president of the United States and denigrating one of his primary methods of communicating with the American people.
And now that Twitter’s “head of site integrity” has been exposed as a rabidly anti-Trump activist who’s referred to the Trump administration as “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE” (among other leftist social media posts), it’s clear that Twitter’s explanation was cooked up.
Coming off like a bald-faced liar, a teenager scrambling for an excuse about why his homework wasn’t completed or was completed badly, isn’t a good look for any CEO.
And the future could look worse. On Thursday, Trump announced he plans some kind of action against social media companies, though the details weren’t clear, as ABC News reported, it could put the companies at more risk for legal liability.
This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2020
The liberal bent of social media titans such as Facebook and Twitter is too well established for any sensible person to doubt that it was politics — not some phantom concern for “integrity” — that led to Twitter’s decision on the Trump posts.
As the November election gets closer by the day, Trump supporters — and all Americans interested in an honest political process — need to remember that the deception on display this week with Twitter is one of the left’s biggest tools to try to win back the White House.
Dorsey and his minions can tweet all the explanations they want, but they aren’t worth much.
Their claims of “integrity” are worth even less.
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