On Saturday (Dec. 12), Twitter Inc. restricted users from commenting on, liking and retweeting a series of tweets by President Trump. In those tweets, Trump claimed that he had won a “legitimate vote” and that the election results had been stolen by widespread fraud. Twitter has since reinstated some of the disabled features.
In three tweets Saturday morning, President Trump responded to the Supreme Court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit in Texas. The lawsuit challenged election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In the lawsuit, Texas argued that four key states had acted illegally by imposing epidemic-related reforms on their electoral processes and asked the Supreme Court to prevent them from casting “illegal and unconstitutional votes” in Electoral College elections.
Trump tweeted, “This is a huge and shameful miscarriage of justice, the American people have been cheated and our country has been disgraced. We were never even given the opportunity to appear in court!”
In another tweet, Trump said that if only “legal votes” were counted, he “won the election by a landslide. Then in another tweet, he wrote that two Republican governors, Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona, fought alongside his Democratic opponent to steal the vote from him.
Trump wrote: “Who’s the worse governor? Is it Brian Kemp of Georgia or Doug Ducey of Arizona?” “These are two RINO (Republican In Name Only) Republicans who have fought me and the Republican Party harder than any Democrat. They allowed the states I easily won to be stolen. Never forget, vote them out of office!”
All three of Trump’s tweets were tagged with a warning by Twitter Inc. that read, “This claim of election fraud is controversial.” At the same time, the ability to click like and retweet under these tweets has been disabled. When users tried to retweet or click “like” on these tweets, a message popped up that read, “We prevent tweets like this that violate Twitter’s rules from reaching more people, so we’re turning off most ways to interact with them.”
Twitter has since given in and restored the ability to click “like” on the president’s tweets, allowing users to “quote the tweet” next to their own comments.
In recent days, President Trump’s comments on social media platforms have been subject to constant scrutiny and restrictions. The president and his allies have vowed to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Regulatory Act of 1996. The provision protects social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube from being sued in U.S. courts for content posted by users because these social media companies are seen as platforms, not as publishers.
Critics of the social media giants say they effectively act as publishers when they target certain users or topics for censorship, and use their so-called “fact-checking powers” to flag content they don’t like as misinformation.
This (Section 230) is really a shield for social media networks because they claim to be public platforms,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said at a news conference. But if you’re actually a publisher, you have certain responsibilities, and you shouldn’t be absolved of them.”
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