SAN ANSELMO, CALIFORNIA - MAY 29: In this photo illustration a notification from Twitter appears on ... [+]
Facebook and Twitter are not public utilities, yet there’s no denying their public value and influence. President Trump posts more or less the same content on each platform, but over the past week, reactions to that content have differed entirely. Facebook has taken a laissez-faire approach to Trump’s posts, whereas Twitter has decided to fact-check and issue warnings. The differing strategies for moderating political content might reveal the different roles each company believes it should have in contributing to the democratic process.
Last week, when President Trump tweeted that mail-in ballots in California would lead to mass voter fraud, Twitter flagged the post as “potentially misleading,” marking the first time a social media company has fact-checked a president. Facebook did not react to the same post on its own platform. Regardless, Trump threw a tantrum and threatened consequences against all social media.
As demonstrations surged around the country, protesting police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who died while in police custody, Trump published a post warning Minneapolis protesters that he’d send in the National Guard. He said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase attributed to a white police chief cracking down on protests during the civil rights era. Twitter placed a public interest notice on the tweet, alerting users that the content breaks the platform’s rules about the “glorification of violence,” but that the post would remain for the public’s interest.
Screenshot demonstrating President Trump's tweet about looting with public interest notice from ... [+]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came under fire from both the public and his own employees after refusing to do anything about the very same inflammatory post published on his platform. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg doubled down in a video chat Q&A with employees, saying that he had made a “tough decision” but that it “was pretty thorough,” reports the New York Times.
“I know many people are upset that we’ve left the president’s posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Facebook post on Friday evening, after a call with Trump that both parties described as “productive,” according to Axios. “Although the post had a troubling historical reference, we decided to leave it up because the National Guard references meant we read it as a warning about state action, and we think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force.”
Zuckerberg also said that his decision to leave the post up is based on his belief that people should be able to see it for themselves, because “ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized in the open.”
The idea that the people should decide for themselves is not new for Zuckerberg. Last October, Facebook made ads from politicians exempt from fact-checks, saying that users could just opt to see “less ads” on the platform if they were bothered. Political advertisements on television are not required to be fact-checked either, but traditional media companies and cable networks have developed norms around fact-checking ads. Twitter decided to dispense with political ads altogether, banning them from the platform last November, a move that also sparked controversy due to the difficulty in defining a political advertisement.
“The question is, how can you get into a world where you are policing the content of politicians without being seen as doing it in a partisan way?” said Joshua Tucker, professor of politics and co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University. “And Facebook is essentially saying that there’s no way to do that.”
Ever since the 2016 election, Facebook has been clear that it doesn’t intend to be an arbiter of truth, and in an interview on FOX last week, argued that private companies and social media platforms shouldn’t be in the position of doing that either. Yet as of late, Twitter has evolved into an entity that values truth and is willing to take down posts of world leaders that are found to be potentially harmful or untruthful.
The coronavirus pandemic represented a turning point for Twitter, an acceptance of a Dorsey-given duty to promote truthful content. In order to stop the spread of virus-related misinformation, Twitter revised its terms of service in March to say that it would remove posts by anyone if such posts went “against guidance from authoritative sources of global and public health information.”
Soon after, Twitter removed tweets by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro that touted false and potentially harmful cures or encouraged breaking social distancing orders.
Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough told Politico last week, “We now have the tools in place to label content that may contain misleading claims that could cause offline harm.”
It’s worth noting that in the recent case of Trump’s tweets, even as the president cries censorship and the stifling of free speech, he was not, in fact, censored or stifled.
“Twitter has now for the very first time dipped their toe in the water and said, we’re gonna begin to call out politicians when they’re violating our terms and services,” said Tucker. “It’s a strong statement that they crossed that line, but they didn’t take down his tweets or suspend his account for a week. They didn’t cancel his Twitter account. They didn’t even make the tweets inaccessible.”
Facebook’s strategy seems to be based around protection of free speech, even when you have a “visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric,” as Zuckerberg put it in his Facebook post on Friday evening. By adding caveats to Trump’s tweets, Twitter is essentially exercising its own right to free speech and thus furthering the conversation by providing a counterweight.
In creating a strategy around the need to present the facts, not just provide a microphone for any idiot with an idea, Twitter is in effect acting like more of a news organization than a social networking platform. And one of the main roles of the news in a democracy is to hold public officials, and the things they say, accountable.
“On the one hand I think Twitter is absolutely to be applauded for applying its terms of services to the president and for trying to be consistent about what it’s doing in the realm of political speech,” said Tucker. “On the other hand, we do want to always be careful about what we ask for in terms of these social media companies playing a larger role in regulating political speech. And that’s the tension.”
