Twitter vows to fight ‘election misinformation.’ More ‘censorship’ coming

There is cause for concern regarding Twitter’s efforts to limit the spread of misinformation. But the piece seems to reason that since it’s been inconsistent, it shouldn’t try at all… or that some other party should control what posts on Twitter? It’s vague on solutions.

“Twitter has proven time and again it cannot be trusted to serve as a neutral judge …” But who else can be the judge?

There’s a bigger problem here: historically, conservatives—and U.S. law in general—have leaned more toward regarding corporations as having similar rights as individuals. There’s a long history of seeing corporations and government entities as profoundly different things. Now, suddenly, because we don’t like the choices they’re making we want Twitter and Facebook to be held to First Amendment standards as though they were government entities?

A case can be made for this, but we haven’t bothered to make it, and it’s not something we can just assume.

Historically, publishers have been allowed to pick and choose what they want to publish—in as biased a way as they like.

So we have this new thing, social media, that doesn’t exactly fit the “publishing” model… or any other model, really. So we need to carefully work through what sort of regulation they need an why and how it would be implemented fairly.

I’m not yet persuaded there is a better way than the marketplace.

As for “election misinformation,” I’m all for Twitter cracking down on that. I hope they’ll be more consistent than they’ve been in the past, but no, they’re not obligated to provide a voice for what they know to be damaging lies.

I’m troubled that people would rely on Twitter, Facebook, et al. as a source of truth for any discussion.