Donald Trump has been over-reliant on Twitter during his presidency. Twitter has started to come down on some of his tweets. Trump has responded with a questionable executive order.
Twitter's actions are questionable. They have allowed a lot of misleading information on their platform without taking action. Where are their notes on Biden's account? In the case of Trump's tweets, they used CNN for fact checking. CNN is well known for pushing a liberal agenda. In all fairness to Twitter, none of the news agencies out there are even close to neutral, but their approach doesn't seem to be fair to Trump.
One of the arguments being made is that Twitter (and Facebook) have become so widely used that they are like a public square. As such, Twitter should not take on the role of censoring speech. There are some problems with these arguments. For starters, Twitter is a business, not a government agency. Instead of being like a public square, they are more like a store that is open to the public.
Businesses can create rules for conduct. Businesses can put restriction on how people can act in their stores. Similarly, websites can put restrictions on how you use their servers. It is a common practice to include Term of Service and Community Guidelines for content-sharing websites.
An open discussion, however, needs to take the liability away from the website. Otherwise, companies will crack down on content purely for the sake of avoiding legal action. This can prevent meaningful discussions from occurring. Waiving liability is a much better option than encouraging censorship. What's worse is the precedent, and I'm going to change the subject a bit.
I have been highly critical of the media for years. Everyone is pushing an agenda. I was hoping that the internet would address some of the problems I had been seeing. News has become strictly one-way, and they know it. They feed us information that goes unchecked. I was hoping that news websites would make it easier to call out their mistakes. Unfortunately, the one-way approach persisted.
This needs to change. No respectable news agency will deprive readers or viewers of the opportunity to provide feedback. Take a look at the media. These opportunities don't exist. Keep in mind that the current model, where people are more likely to join websites with content they like, means that even simple feedback would likely be skewed in their favor. Even so, they are effectively prohibiting anyone from correcting their mistakes.
Trump's executive order won't change this problem. Introducing liability would create a reluctance to open up a dialog. We need commenting on news. Trump might be closing that door. For those of us who hate liberal propaganda going unchecked, this is going to keep us in the same mess.
Perhaps I'm a little biased on this issue. With all of the misinformation coming out lately, I really wish I could develop a competing platform. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources. If I did, Trump's new guidelines could be disastrous. Trying to help people find the truth would mean involvement in selecting informative posts. This could be viewed as curation, even if through algorithms, and would likely run afoul of Trump's guidelines.
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