Tag: Twitter

Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano Backs Twitter’s Right To Fact-Check Trump

The legal analyst said Twitter can correct any user it wants, “including the president of the United States.”

Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano exposed the holes in President Donald Trump’s threat to regulate social media platforms like Twitter after the company tagged the president’s tweets with fact-check warnings.

“Can they do this?” Fox News host Sandra Smith asked Napolitano of Twitter’s move on Wednesday.

“The short answer is yes,” Napolitano responded, before adding, “The president is right about the bias in social media and the president is also understandably not happy about his being fact-checked. I mean, nobody would [be].” Continue reading.

Shining sunlight on Trump’s idiocy is the best disinfectant

Washington Post logoTimothy Klausutis is right: His late wife deserves better than a president who has cynically seized on the tragic circumstances of her death at 28 and “perverted it for perceived political gain.” President Trump’s unfathomable cruelty in suggesting that then-Rep. Joe Scarborough had an affair with Lori Klausutis, an aide in his office, and murdered her almost 19 years ago, is sickening. Her husband’s anguish over what he described as the “constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died” is palpable in the letter he sent last week to Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, imploring him to remove Trump’s tweets about his wife.

Basic human decency, a quality manifestly lacking in Trump, argues in favor of granting Klausutis’s request. Yet, while my heart aches for him and his family, I think that, on balance, deleting the tweets would be a mistake.

Twitter is both a private company and a powerful public platform. Once it assumes the role of deciding what speech by public officials is to be allowed and what is to be taken down, it has ventured onto the slipperiest of slopes. I’m not sure I want Dorsey or his team deciding what the public should and shouldn’t see from the elected president of the United States. Even this one. Continue reading.

#AskTheAG: Barr is taking Twitter questions on coronavirus issues, and it’s getting ugly

Washington Post logoThe Justice Department offered the public a rare opportunity on Wednesday morning to submit questions to Attorney General William P. Barr for a “nationwide #AskTheAG Q&A session on May 1.” Specifically, it asked via Twitter for questions “on how DOJ is protecting public safety & combatting fraud, price gouging, hoarding, & more” during the coronavirus pandemic.

Justice Department

✔@TheJusticeDept

AG Barr will be participating in the nationwide Q&A session on May 1 at 12pm ET

Send us your Qs on how DOJ is protecting public safety & combatting fraud, price gouging, hoarding, & more during the pandemic.

Reply below or tweet your question with

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The response, as of early Thursday morning, was voluminous but surely not what the department had in mind when it asked for questions about the pandemic.Only a fraction were even about it, and they veered off from the suggested topics, perhaps fitting at best under the “& more” category. Continue reading.

Twitter Announces Plan to Label, and Possibly Remove, Deceptive Media From Its Platform

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter will begin to label and in some cases remove doctored or manipulated photos, audio and videos that are designed to mislead people.

The company said Tuesday that the new rules prohibit sharing synthetic or manipulated material that’s likely to cause harm. Material that is manipulated but isn’t necessarily harmful may get a warning label.

Under the new guidelines, the slowed-down video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which she appeared to slur her words could get the label if someone tweets it out after the rules go into effect March 5. Continue reading.

In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies

New York Times logoIn September, an obscure Twitter account promoting a fringe belief about an anti-Trump cabal within the government tweeted out a hashtag: #FakeWhistleblower.

It was typical for the anonymous account, which traffics in far-right content and a conspiracy theory known as QAnon, some of whose adherents think that satanic pedophiles control the “deep state.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently labeled QAnon a potential domestic terror threat.

Still, that did not stop others, including a Republican congressional candidate, from quickly picking up the hashtag and tweeting it. Within a week, hundreds of QAnon believers and “MAGA” activists had joined in, posting memes and bogus reports to undermine the complaint by a government whistle-blower that President Trump had pressed Ukraine’s leader for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.

Then Mr. Trump tweeted the hashtag himself.

View the complete November 2 article by Mike McIntire, Karen Yourish and Larry Buchanan on The New York Times website here.

Twitter to start refusing all political ads

The Hill logoTwitter will no longer run any political advertising promoting candidates or particular hot-button issues, CEO Jack Dorsey announced Wednesday.

The announcement comes amid ongoing controversy over rival Facebook’s decision to allow misinformation in political advertising, a move decried by top Democrats over recent weeks.

Dorsey said Wednesday afternoon that Twitter’s stance from now on will be that “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

“We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally,” Dorsey wrote in a Twitter thread. “A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.”

View the complete October 30 article by Emily Birnbaum on The Hill website here.

Locking out ‘Team Mitch’ could cost Twitter

Decision by Republican campaign committees to withhold ad dollars from Twitter could have a tangible effect

The decision by Republican campaign committees to withhold ad dollars from Twitter could have a tangible effect.

The Republican National Committee, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign as well as the House and Senate GOP campaign committees took that step in response to the social media platform’s temporary lockout of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign account.

“Twitter has a clear bias against conservatives and Republicans. The hashtag associated the disgusting threats against Mitch McConnell was allowed to trend for an entire day. But McConnell’s posting of video of the threats themselves got his own account suspended. It is ludicrous bias in the extreme,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.

View the complete August 8 article by Niels Lesniewski on The Roll Call website here.

Donald Trump Jr. Shares, Then Deletes, a Tweet Questioning Kamala Harris’s Race

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared another person’s tweet with his millions of followers during the Democratic debate on Thursday that falsely claimed Senator Kamala Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans.

“Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,” Ali Alexander, a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities, wrote on Twitter. “She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

Mr. Trump, a valuable Republican surrogate as his father faces a bruising 2020 race, posted the tweet of unverified information, then asked his more than three million followers: “Is this true? Wow.” By the end of the night, Mr. Trump had deleted his message, and by Friday, a spokesman said it had all been a misunderstanding.

View the complete June 28 article by Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

Trump is mad about the size of his crowd on Twitter

One of the obvious perks about being the president of the United States is that you can essentially snap your fingers and have something appear in your office in short order. Maybe a Diet Coke. Or maybe the head of Twitter.

President Trump snapped his fingers and summoned at least the latter of those options to the Oval Office on Tuesday. He’d begun the day with a series of tweets complaining about a series of things including Twitter which, he said, “[didn’t] treat me well as a Republican.” The service was “very discriminatory” and it was “hard for people to sign on,” with Twitter “[c]onstantly taking people off list,” which is a little hazy as a critique.

But — snap — there was Twitter chief Jack Dorsey in the White House. And in short order we learned about Trump’s primary complaint.

View the complete April 23 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.