trump twitter

Twitter – Tuesday’s fact check highlights the pitfalls of this approach. One of the top authorities cited is CNN’s Chris Cillizza, a pundit notorious for his focus on horse-race political optics, not public policy. A bit farther down is a tweet from Jennifer Bendery, a reporter at HuffPost, an unabashedly liberal publication. Her source? Oregon governor Kate Brown, a Democrat, whom Bendery quotes as saying, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” That may be true, but the fact that another politician disagrees with Trump hardly proves that Trump is wrong. The president was bound to accuse Twitter of bias no matter what, but this sort of sourcing makes the complaint far too easy to lodge.

The debate around fact-checking on social media platforms tends to dwell on tricky and sometimes philosophical questions of free speech and internet governance. But the problem with farming out the job is more prosaic: third-party fact-checkers are often just as full of shit as the politicians they’re debunking. Facebook has had a program since 2016 that flags posts deemed misleading by organizations like Politifact and Factcheck.org. (The policy notably exempts speech by politicians, including Trump’s election fraud post, “even if the substance of that claim has been debunked elsewhere.”) This can produce absurd outcomes. Earlier this month, the platform slapped a “Partly False Information” label on an anti-Trump ad because Politifact disputed its claim that “Trump bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street.” Considering that each part of that sentence—bailed out, Wall Street, Main Street—is a vague metaphor, it’s not even possible to say whether it’s true or false. Yet Politifact executive director Aaron Sharockman told WIRED’s Steven Levy, “I feel really good about the rating as calling it false.”

Some of the most prominent names in the fact-checking business repeatedly make a hash of it. In 2018, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post gave Bernie Sanders three Pinocchios (out of four) for touting a study that found that Medicare For All would lower overall healthcare spending by $2 trillion. The author complained to Kessler that Democrats were ignoring the fact that government spending would go up, which he considered the more important point. But the $2 trillion results were right there in his paper; Sanders’s claim was objectively true. More recently, after the first Democratic primary debate last summer, Kessler and his team took issue with Sanders’s statement that “Three people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America.” When you add in debts, they argued, the bottom half actually has negative wealth. Somehow, this made Sanders’s claim misleading.

The point here isn’t to defend Sanders’s arguments. The point is that political truth is a difficult thing to pin down because politics is fundamentally about convincing other people to accept your interpretation of reality. Professional fact checkers pretend to be floating above that process, but in fact, they are often participants—which is the exact position social media platforms are trying to avoid.

On that score, the early returns for Twitter are not great. A few hours after the inaugural fact check, Trump surprised precisely no one by accusing the platform of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “completely stifling FREE SPEECH.” The next morning, he continued the tirade: “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down before we can ever allow this to happen.”

We hardly need to dwell on the irony of Trump accusing Twitter of censoring him—on Twitter. Suffice it to say that the platform’s well-intentioned efforts may have stumbled into the ultimate please-nobody compromise. Trump’s soapbox remains undiminished; howls of anti-conservative discrimination draw new sustenance, and many of Trump’s critics say Twitter didn’t go far enough.

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