Neutral Platform? Twitter Wants to Label Trump Tweets ‘Offensive’

March 28th, 2019 10:45 AM

The liberal media have long pushed Twitter to silence President Donald Trump. After much pressure, the company is considering giving them what they want.

In the Washington Post, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde said the company was considering “labeling” Trump’s tweets. In a tech forum hosted by the Washington Post, Gadde explained that Twitter was looking to “put some context” around tweets that violate Twitter’s policies, but are from world leaders.

Apparently, Twitter “leaves that content on the platform” with no context according to the current policy surrounding “newsworthy” tweets. Gadde said that this policy deceives other Twitter users into thinking that such content is worth imitating.

The Post wrote that “the next time a politician, dignitary — or perhaps a president — makes an utterance that violates Twitter standards, the message might be accompanied by a note that expands on the 280-character tweet.”  The article then launched into a list of what it considered were President Trump’s Twitter sins, which “tested Twitter’s community standards repeatedly.”

Neither the Post nor Twitter mentioned other politicians and major figures who have tweeted fake news, combative, insulting tweets, or literal threats. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khameini, tweeted that “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated.” This tweet was not removed, nor was it framed in context.

Nor was Hillary Clinton’s call for incivility towards the Republican party. She tweeted a video clip of herself saying that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”

And Rep. Ilhan Omar has been able to put out tweets that are significantly anti-semitic, including, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” None of these were marked or even taken down.

Twitter even said that a video where Rev. Louis Farrakhan called Jewish people “termites” “did not violate their terms of service.” One wonders if the new labelling system would even bother to cover these kinds of abusive tweets, or if it would simply focus on conservatives on Twitter.