One of the most prominent ways that tech companies have been doing that, of late, is the result of realizing that they get ample media support and can stay in the good graces of legacy media outlets when they censor content for being “misinformation.” The guise of protecting the world from “misinformation” is fast becoming the easiest justification for censorship online right now.
Twitter has been one of those companies most accused of negatively impacting the public conversation and pushing for censorship. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey talked about this in a livestream with Showtime hosts Desus Nice and The Kid Mero.
“Misleading information is like the challenge of our industry right now,” Dorsey said in the Periscoped stream. The hosts were eager to discuss what Dorsey had in mind for punishing those who say things that is deemed to be “misinformation.” The example they gave is, what would happen if President Trump tweeted “potentially harmful” statements about the coronavirus?
Dorsey responded that “labeling would come in really handy,” and talked about Twitter’s recent policy announcement that is aimed to tackle the tweets of public leaders. “When it’s broadcast on television, you have no ability to talk back,” Dorsey said, and while you may not think it based on Twitter’s recent actions, the ability for users to comment and disagree is an important part of Twitter, Dorsey at least says he believes.
Dorsey said that instead of removing the tweets of world leaders, Twitter will instead introduce an “interstitial.” “Anything that we can do to interstitial a lot of this and provide context that is credible and might show a disagreement or a debate around the topic, I think, would be helpful,” Dorsey said.
“The team is working on a great experiment to do just that, that we hope to launch as quickly as possible to give people a broader context for a particular tweet…I think we’ll disarm a bunch of it.” The details are sparse so far but it appears that Dorsey plans to introduce a feature that comes in when Twitter finds a statement that a world leader makes and wants to challenge it.
In other words, Twitter feels brave enough to place some kind of editorialized interstitial between a world leader and the reader, that alters the way the reader perceives the tweet. It could end up being similar to the way Facebook has decided it wants to fact-check certain statements on the platform – and has been putting an overlay on content with a link to a fact-check.
It’s worth mentioning that Facebook’s fact-check has several times in the last month alone, “debunked” something that turned out to actually be true – so Twitter, if it too decides to play this game, must be feeling pretty confident they’re going to get it right. Or, perhaps, they’re just happy to brazenly wield the power anyway.
Dorsey said that Twitter’s number one focus right now is dealing with misinformation. “The ability to create deep fakes is moving much faster and with much higher quality than the ability to detect it. So this is going to be a race, just like security is. You can never build a perfect system. You just have to be 10 steps ahead of the attackers,” he said during the stream.
But will executives at Twitter ever pull the trigger? Twitter on Thursday announced it will add warning labels to problematic tweets from politicians like Donald Trump, whose deranged posts may violate its rules, but remain a matter of public interest.
It’s a potentially major step toward rooting out harmful content on the site, but raises familiar concerns for a company that has long been inept at policing content, and hesitant to do so in the first place.
“In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations,” Twitter said in a statement. “To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations.”
In its blog post Thursday, Twitter acknowledged that certain unnamed “government officials and public figures...sometimes say things that could be considered controversial or invite debate and discussion”—perhaps, for instance, this or this, or this—but emphasized that a “critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable.”
So, Twitter said, it will “place a notice” on such tweets in the future, which will require users to go through a screen before seeing the tweet, and “provide additional context and clarity.” It will also “take steps to make sure the Tweet is not algorithmically elevated on our service, to strike the right balance between enabling free expression, fostering accountability, and reducing the potential harm caused by these Tweets.”
Asked by reporter Ashley Feinberg in January what Twitter would do if Trump “tweeted out asking each of his followers to murder one journalist”—an extreme, but uncomfortably conceivable hypothetical—Dorsey responded with word salad. “I’m not going to talk about particulars,” he said in the HuffPost interview.
The new policy, which the company was reported to be weighing back in March, would represent at least some action toward addressing the platform’s misuse. But the announcement failed to establish a clear criteria as to which tweets would warrant such a warning label, which likely means Twitter will continue to rely on its gut in adjudicating what does and doesn’t cross the line.
The company explained in its blog post Thursday that it will judge tweets to be dangerous based on the “immediacy and severity of potential harm from the rule violation with an emphasis on ensuring physical safety.”
But weighing the “potential harm” of speech, let alone the public value of a controversial statement, can be difficult even for established news organizations. Dorsey and Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg have already proven clumsy in their attempts to make such assessments. It’s hard to imagine Twitter will magically improve overnight.
Of course, the company is taking a big political risk in taking any action at all. While many users have complained about hate speech and fake news, Trump and other conservatives have whined that efforts to clean up the site amount to censorship. Just this week, the president claimed that the company is “biased” in favor of Democrats, engaged in a shadowy plot to make it “very hard for people to join me on Twitter.”
“Twitter is very terrible, what they do,” he said in a Fox Business Network interview Wednesday. “They make it very much harder for me to get out the message.” Twitter’s latest action could make it even harder for the president to get his message out there, if that message happens to be lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate or retweets of far-right anti-Muslim videos.
That could fuel more accusations from the right that Twitter and other Silicon Valley companies are biased against them—an accusation Dorsey has bristled at. In theory, it will be a major move for Twitter if they apply the warning label to Trump tweets. In practice, the process could be much more equivocal.
