4 ms·

Who else's tweets are they going to fact check? The Dalai Lama? They have to start somewhere, and a guy who's using their service to spread disinformation about

Who else's tweets are they going to fact check? The Dalai Lama? They have to start somewhere, and a guy who's using their service to spread disinformation about vote by mail in a blatant attempt to rally his base around contesting an election if it doesn't go his way - hours after terrorizing the surviving family of a political staffer for no obvious reason (again with no basis on fact) - seems like a great place to start. Especially if your company isn't (completely) run by invertebrates. Twitter handed Trump a bullhorn. They didn't need to, but they did. For purely business reasons, I'm sure. But they _own_ that bullhorn, and they can take it away whenever they like. "Just business," his TV character would say. I can make a website right now; donaldtrumpcantposthere.com; and I can put a little chat room there and people can type whatever they want and maybe it'll show up, but you know what? Whoever posts there, I can do whatever I want with it. I might get in trouble for _other_ things (facilitating online bullying, distributing copyrighted material, etc.), but "free speech" is not one of them. That's how it works when you deal with private corporations. Don't like it? Move to China :b

Fjolsvith 6y ago
How about UFO sightings? Bigfoot? Debunked Russian Conspiracy tweets by Adam Schiff?
dekhn 6y ago
I'd be fine with Twitter fact checking the Dalai Lama. For example, his most recent tweet says "When this blue planet is viewed from space, there are no national boundaries to be seen." Here's a photo from space of the India-Pakistan border: https://qz.com/india/516864/the-india-pakistan-border-is-so-closely-guarded-that-it-can-be-seen-from-space/ https://qz.com/india/516864/the-india-pakistan-border-is-so-... Assuming that's not a fake photo (or that this one is: https://time.com/4780003/international-borders-from-space/ https://time.com/4780003/international-borders-from-space/), I would say that sufficient evidence exists to say that what the Dalai Lama stated is factually incorrect.
- dylan-m 6y ago
  My point is his factually incorrect statements are generally innocuous, whereas the same statement by the _President of the United States_ is much more of a problem. I think it's unreasonable to expect Twitter to regurgitate such dangerous statements uncritically. The slippery slope thing or the "why do anything if it isn't perfect" thing needn't enter into this: Donald Trump's Twitter account is an objectively different problem than the Dalai Lama's Twitter account. (That's a really cool picture, by the way!).

Fjolsvith 6y ago

How about UFO sightings? Bigfoot? Debunked Russian Conspiracy tweets by Adam Schiff?

dekhn 6y ago

I'd be fine with Twitter fact checking the Dalai Lama. For example, his most recent tweet says "When this blue planet is viewed from space, there are no national boundaries to be seen." Here's a photo from space of the India-Pakistan border: https://qz.com/india/516864/the-india-pakistan-border-is-so-closely-guarded-that-it-can-be-seen-from-space/ https://qz.com/india/516864/the-india-pakistan-border-is-so-... Assuming that's not a fake photo (or that this one is: https://time.com/4780003/international-borders-from-space/ https://time.com/4780003/international-borders-from-space/), I would say that sufficient evidence exists to say that what the Dalai Lama stated is factually incorrect.

dylan-m 6y ago
My point is his factually incorrect statements are generally innocuous, whereas the same statement by the _President of the United States_ is much more of a problem. I think it's unreasonable to expect Twitter to regurgitate such dangerous statements uncritically. The slippery slope thing or the "why do anything if it isn't perfect" thing needn't enter into this: Donald Trump's Twitter account is an objectively different problem than the Dalai Lama's Twitter account. (That's a really cool picture, by the way!).