With his tweets about Scarborough’s intern, Trump set a trap for Twitter

[mystery-ak]

May 28, 2020
With his tweets about Scarborough’s intern, Trump set a trap for Twitter
By Andrea Widburg

Even Trump supporters have wondered about Trump’s tweets implying that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had something to do with a young intern’s death in his office when he was still a Florida congressman. It’s true that Scarborough and his co-host and wife Mika Brzezinksi have spent three years accusing Trump of treasonous collusion with the Russians, but Trump’s venom still seemed strange.

I, however, don’t think it was strange at all. Trump is one of the most calculating, rational people ever to occupy the White House. He’s been faced with a serious problem, which is the fact that the immensely powerful social media giants, which are the gateway to most information nowadays, have already begun trying to sway the election to Biden. Legislatively, thanks to three years of Russiagate and the current hostile House, Trump has been powerless.

So, Trump set a trap. On Wednesday, the Twitter mouse took the bait.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/with_his_tweets_about_scarboroughs_intern_trump_set_a_trap_for_twitter.html

[Cyber Liberty]

Rubio pointed this very thing out, I think yesterday.  Twitter crossed a Rubicon when they switched from being a passive Bulletin Board to active Publisher.  I'm not ready to acknowledge multi-dimensional Chess by Trump, but this does seem to have been calculated at some level.

[EasyAce]

I'm not ready to acknowledge multi-dimensional Chess by Trump, but this does seem to have been calculated at some level.

Twitter is a medium, not a message, and it should decline to inject itself into the middle of America’s political debates. President Trump cannot “close down” social media, and he should not idly threaten to do so. And, pace Senator Hawley, user-driven websites are not being “subsidized” by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects the “provider or user of an interactive computer service” from being treated as the “publisher” of opinions whether or not he has not reviewed them. It is Section 230, by way of example, that prevents Joe Scarborough from being able to sue Twitter when one its members engages in a libel. Section 230 has been maligned lately, but we have yet to see any proposal that would be likely to improve it.

Time was when the obvious response to reprehensible behavior was admonition. The root cause of the mess we are witnessing today is not Twitter’s bias or legislative favoritism, and it is most certainly not that the president lacks the power to suspend the First Amendment. Rather, it is that the president lacks the power to control his own urges. What needs changing is the behavior of the man who sits at the heart of all of our national conversations, both good and ill.

---Editorial, National Review.

[Cyber Liberty]

Twitter is a medium, not a message, and it should decline to inject itself into the middle of America’s political debates. President Trump cannot “close down” social media, and he should not idly threaten to do so. And, pace Senator Hawley, user-driven websites are not being “subsidized” by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects the “provider or user of an interactive computer service” from being treated as the “publisher” of opinions whether or not he has not reviewed them. It is Section 230, by way of example, that prevents Joe Scarborough from being able to sue Twitter when one its members engages in a libel. Section 230 has been maligned lately, but we have yet to see any proposal that would be likely to improve it.

Time was when the obvious response to reprehensible behavior was admonition. The root cause of the mess we are witnessing today is not Twitter’s bias or legislative favoritism, and it is most certainly not that the president lacks the power to suspend the First Amendment. Rather, it is that the president lacks the power to control his own urges. What needs changing is the behavior of the man who sits at the heart of all of our national conversations, both good and ill.

---Editorial, National Review.

Well, OK, but I don't think that was the point I was making. 

[HoustonSam]

Rubio pointed this very thing out, I think yesterday.  Twitter crossed a Rubicon when they switched from being a passive Bulletin Board to active Publisher.  I'm not ready to acknowledge multi-dimensional Chess by Trump, but this does seem to have been calculated at some level.

I'm with you; I do not credit Trump with the level of foresight and strategy described in the cited article.  However a re-clarification of the rights and obligations of Curator versus Publisher, and a renewed application of that distinction to the search engine and social media companies, is overdue.

[Cyber Liberty]

I'm with you; I do not credit Trump with the level of foresight and strategy described in the cited article.  However a re-clarification of the rights and obligations of Curator versus Publisher, and a renewed application of that distinction to the search engine and social media companies, is overdue.

A clarification is unlikely to occur, because this will be reduced to partisan screaming in short order.  I wonder how the race card will be played?

[EasyAce]

Should social media companies be getting into the fact-checking game? It's a bad idea, if you ask me. But it's a perfectly legal thing for them to do.

The standard Republican talking point on this right now is that affixing fact-checking links to some tweets makes Twitter a "publisher" instead of a "platform" or "forum." It might make for an interesting semantic distinction, but the legally significant issue is whether Twitter is the speaker or creator of Donald Trump's tweets. If not, it is not legally liable for them. (The same goes for every other user of Twitter, too.)

If you're thinking, "But, but, what about when Twitter creates a fact-check link and presents it after a user's posts?" Courts have routinely ruled that a digital company's decisions about how to present content (or what content to present at all) do not transform it into the speaker of user content.

But back to Trump's new order: It's an Orwellian document, defining federal government regulation of Americans' speech as "free speech" and private questioning of government authority as "censorship." In Trump's formulation, private companies can censor the most powerful person in the country but not the other way around . . .

. . . Interestingly, after years of downplaying the idea that foreign actors used social media in an attempt to influence the 2016 election, Trump now opportunistically claims that the U.S. government must have power over these platforms to stop the scourge of "disinformation from foreign governments."

But his biggest complaint is about alleged ideological bias by private companies. Despite previously rallying around the rights of conservative businesses to choose who they do business with and decline to display liberal messages (think florists and bakers), Trump now says that private businesses should have to be totally content-neutral conduits of whatever messages that customers want to broadcast . . .

. . . [E]ven if he could just declare that Twitter and Facebook were the digital equivalent of the National Mall, this would mean that government actors would face serious hurdles to restricting speech on them. Bottom line: Unless government officials are going to completely take over Twitter and Facebook content moderation, invoking public forums here is just bluster . . .

--- Elizabeth Nolan Brown, from "Trump's Executive Order on Twitter is a Total Mess," Reason.

Short translation: President Tweety, as usual, thinks the Constitution is just some old lumberyard of a boat moored in the Charlestown Navy Yard.

[Chosen Daughter]

Oh brother.   

[goatprairie]

May 28, 2020
With his tweets about Scarborough’s intern, Trump set a trap for Twitter
By Andrea Widburg

Even Trump supporters have wondered about Trump’s tweets implying that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had something to do with a young intern’s death in his office when he was still a Florida congressman. It’s true that Scarborough and his co-host and wife Mika Brzezinksi have spent three years accusing Trump of treasonous collusion with the Russians, but Trump’s venom still seemed strange.

I, however, don’t think it was strange at all. Trump is one of the most calculating, rational people ever to occupy the White House. He’s been faced with a serious problem, which is the fact that the immensely powerful social media giants, which are the gateway to most information nowadays, have already begun trying to sway the election to Biden. Legislatively, thanks to three years of Russiagate and the current hostile House, Trump has been powerless.

So, Trump set a trap. On Wednesday, the Twitter mouse took the bait.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/with_his_tweets_about_scarboroughs_intern_trump_set_a_trap_for_twitter.html

"Trump is one of the most calculating, rational people ever to occupy the White House."