Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley is warning that Twitter’s “fact-checking” of President Trump’s tweets is “making the case for government action to monitor and control social media.”
“The loser will ultimately be free speech,” he writes in a new column on his blog.
Twitter slapped editorial comments on two tweets in which Trump warned of the danger of fraud in mail-in balloting.
Then it “doubled down on its controversial labeling of tweets from President Donald Trump to flag what it views as misleading or offensive material,” said Turley, a Georgetown Law School professor.
“I have strongly opposed Twitter’s policy on censoring and labeling material, including the decision to correct a tweet from the president on the political debate over mail-in voting. Undeterred, Twitter has issued a new warning that a tweet from the president on the rioting in Minneapolis was a violation of its rule for ‘glorifying violence,'” he wrote.
Overnight into Friday, Trump warned of possible federal intervention in the out-of-control riots in Minneapolis, which have now spread to other cities in reaction to the death of a black man in police custody.
Trump said, “We will assume control.”
Then he wrote: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
While Turley described the president’s words as “inflammatory and unhelpful,” he said that doesn’t justify Twitter’s decision to add a warning label to the statements that they “violate[] our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today.”
Turley wrote: “Calling for tough law enforcement is a quintessential political statement. My objections was not that it glorified violence but that it was an irresponsible escalation of the rhetoric when Minneapolis police were struggling with a very dangerous and volatile situation.”
And, he added: “‘Glorifying violence’ could be a standard used to curtail everything from War and Peace to Looney Tune cartoons. It is an arbitrary standard that invites biased enforcement.
“Where Trump escalated the rhetoric, Twitter has escalated its controls. As discussed in the columns, Democratic leaders have called for years for Twitter and other companies to crackdown on political speech deemed misleading or false. It is now plunging headlong into private censorship and speech regulation. This is wrong and a threat to free speech. As a private entity, Twitter falls below the radar of the First Amendment. However, it can cause irreparable damage to free speech by limiting expression for hundreds of millions of users.”
And, he said, Twitter is “making the case” for more government intervention in its business.
Twitter, he said, “is given protections under Section 320 because it has claimed to being neutral supplier of virtual space for people to speak with one another. Roughly 80 million people want to hear from Trump, not Twitter. Yet, Twitter has again inserted itself into that conversation to convey its own view of what is being discussed.”
“Imagine if the telephone company took it upon itself to periodically interrupt calls to express its view of what was just said. If Twitter insists on being an active participant in such postings, it is changing its legal status and morphing into a viewpoint publisher,” he said.
He charged that Twitter “is clearly more concerned with expressing its views than preserving its forum. Frankly, I would not care about such self-inflicted wounds except that free speech will likely suffer the collateral damage from Twitter’s glorifying speech controls.”