Twitter has not said who writes its fact checks. The social media company sparked a backlash from President Donald Trump after appending a fact check to one of his tweets about mail-in voting.
Twitter’s fact check, though, misrepresented the facts by conflating all-mail voting with absentee voting, the Wall Street Journal reported. Twitter later updated the language of its fact check.
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There was an error in Twitter's fact check of Trump's vote-by-mail tweets, underscoring the challenge social media platforms face trying to arbitrate truth.— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) May 27, 2020
It was corrected after an elections professional notified the company (and me) about the mistake.https://t.co/bQmfZc8pBm pic.twitter.com/6IoeSzlXpq
Unlike other prominent fact-checking operations, Twitter doesn’t display the names of the fact check’s authors.
“We’re adding a label to Tweets that then links to a Moment in order to give people on our service more context around what they’re seeing. This Moment includes a variety of information from various sources,” Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an email.
When asked specifically why Twitter isn’t including author bylines on its fact checks, Kennedy wrote: “Nothing further to add here.”
Trump cited Twitter’s fact checks while signing an executive order aimed at reining in alleged political bias at social media companies.
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“Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see,” the executive order states.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized Twitter’s fact-checking approach in an interview with Fox News host Dana Perino that aired Thursday.
“We have a different policy than, I think, Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg said. “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” he continued.
“Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
UPDATE:
VIA Gab News - Yesterday President Trump signed a social media executive order that specifically mentioned Twitter. Twitter doesn’t seem too concerned or scared though and nor should they be as many legal experts have weighed in and stated that this EO doesn’t hold much weight. The executive order goes after CDA Section 230. This is bad. It’s something we wrote our concerns about here.
They covered up his entire tweet with their editorial comment and made it so the President’s tweet could not be commented on or liked by anyone on the site.
If he leads the world off of Silicon Valley platforms: tens of millions of people will follow. If not, Twitter and Silicon Valley will continue to crush any and all dissent.
