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What Next | Daily News and Analysis

TBD | Trump and Twitter Go to War

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Daily News

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On Tuesday, after years of inaction, Twitter fact checked President Trump’s tweets for the first time. Six words were added below the original text, directing readers to outside articles refuting his claims.


Two days later, the president signed an executive order that aims to change the nature of online speech, and the platforms that host it.


Guest: Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at the Verge

 

Host

Lizzie O’Leary


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

On Tuesday, this little thing popped up on Twitter.

0:07.8

Hyperlink under two of the president's tweets with a blue exclamation point.

0:12.2

It said, get the facts about mail-in ballots. And if you clicked on the link, it led to news articles.

0:17.7

They explained that the president's tweets, which claim things like, and I'm quoting here,

0:22.3

there is no way, zero, that mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,

0:28.2

or, in fact, unsubstantiated. When you saw that, what was your reaction? Well, it's always surprising when Twitter takes action.

0:40.6

Twitter is the most slow-moving of our tech companies, and their MO is to consider things

0:48.1

for many years and then sort of come up with a half measure after the fact.

0:53.5

That's Casey Newton. He is the Silicon Valley editor for The Verge,

0:57.0

and he's written about Twitter's decision-making process a lot over the past few years.

1:02.1

How the company has dealt with online harassment,

1:04.9

how they've been slow to remove people like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones,

1:09.1

and how, since the 2016 election, Twitter has been trying

1:12.5

to figure out what to do when the president tweets something inaccurate, especially about voting.

1:18.6

And I think a lot of people had sort of given up on the idea that Twitter would ever take any

1:23.2

action because there had been so many previous Trump tweets that seemed to some people to have gone over that

1:29.2

line. Did you realize when you saw that notification was like, oh man, this is going to be a thing?

1:35.5

Yeah, I think from the moment it appeared online, we all just braced ourselves for the Trump

1:42.0

outburst that was sure to follow. And, you know, it arrived soon

1:46.0

enough. The president's reaction to Twitter's fact check was two-pronged. First, there was the stuff

1:51.9

that Casey was expecting. Trump's tweets saying big tech was censoring him before this year's election

1:57.4

and predictable news coverage. Then there was this other potentially much

...

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