So, Twitter is openly policing opinions, now?
Twitter’s decision to slap a “fact check” on President Donald Trump’s tweets expressing his opinions is a game-changer.
It’s an interesting strategy, because, for starters, it exposes beyond doubt the lie that these companies are “platforms” and not “publishers”. If you’re actively controlling content, you’re a publisher. But claiming to be platforms and not publishers has been the social media companies’ basis for claiming special privileges and protections denied to publishers.
It’s also at the heart of claims that the companies are violating the US First Amendment.
But, even without all that, it strips away any denial of prevailing left-wing bias in Silicon Valley.
Twitter applied a fact check to President Donald Trump on Tuesday because he claimed that voter fraud was more likely under the Democrats’ proposed nationwide vote-by-mail system — something even Democrats once believed.
Yet Twitter does not apply the same standard to inaccurate or speculative statements by Democrats. Case in point: the “very fine people” hoax, claiming Trump praised neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
Note, firstly, that Trump’s claims about voter fraud are opinions. Opinions are purely subjective judgements. By definition, opinions cannot be “fact-checked” – because they’re not facts. They’re opinions.
On the other hand, whether or not Trump praised neo-Nazis is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of fact. Either Trump praised neo-Nazis or he didn’t.
And he didn’t. This is a plain fact.
Anyone who claims the contrary is either deluded or lying. Either way, it’s a claim which can and must be fact-checked, if Twitter is going to be in the fact-checking game without bias.
As Breitbart News has demonstrated extensively, Trump never praised the neo-Nazis, but in fact said they should be “condemned totally”
He praised non-violent protesters, both left and right, on either side of the debate over a statue. And he specifically condemned the murder of left-wing protester Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi as an act of “terrorism.”
Yet Democrats have repeated the “Charlottesville hoax,” over and over — long after CNN’s Jake Tapper himself admitted that it was not true: “[H]e’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people.”
Yet, here’s an all-star list of Democrats who’ve repeated the lie on Twitter:
- Joe Biden
- Kamala Harris
- Bernie Sanders
- Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer
- Nancy Pelosi
- Chuck Schumer
- Ilhan Omar
- Maxine Waters
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- Pete Buttigieg
If Twitter is serious about “fact-checking”, then it must slap a big ol’ FALSE sticker on each and every one of those tweets.
Moreover, if Twitter is finally admitting that it’s a publisher, then that means that it’s now open to President Trump pursuing legal action for libel.
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