Twitter tags Trump's tweets as “misinformation” only following pressure does it do the same to a Chinese official

Aside from a string of tweets from Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s PR machine has been strangely quiet during the dust-up over the extremely controversial decision to tag several tweets from President Trump as “misinformation”.

And now we know why. Among the reasons Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg cited for why social media companies shouldn’t strive to be “arbiters of truth” is the Sisyphean task of filtering, screening and analyzing an endless stream of information. Given the massive user bases of these companies, consistency would be nearly impossible, opening the door to yet more accusations of bias. And for what?

Perhaps that’s why Twitter has spent the last day or so retroactively tagging tweets from certain officials with the Chinese government that also contain “misinformation” – some of it claiming that the coronavirus originated in the US.

Mouthpieces for Beijing, and for practically every government, even Venezuela and Iran (two countries that have drawn scrutiny from Twitter in the form of mass account-deletion) are active on Twitter. And one of the most effective arguments against Twitter’s decision to label Trump’s tweets is that the company hasn’t done nearly enough to filter out far more sinister actors, like ISIS recruiters, or stooges from Russia, China, Iran and America’s myriad geopolitical enemies – and some of our allies too.

Interestingly, a quick look at the foreign ministry spokesman’s feed shows that only a few tweets have been labeled.

Furthermore, aside from the occasional reference to the “terrorists” threatening law and order in Hong Kong, the feed looks almost identical to one of those left-wing rose emoji accounts with 5k-10k followers.

Meanwhile, Taiwan has continued to poke and prod at Beijing by speaking out in defense of Hong Kong. A top Taiwanese official said prosperity and stability cannot be easily disrupted by separatist forces, rebutting Beijing’s accusations of “terrorism”.

As the conversation about Twitter’s role in moderating ‘the conversation’ unfurls on twitter, two analysts with Height Capital Markets argued that the White House’s new executive order has “more bark than bite”. Investors, looking at this morning’s performance, have taken a decidedly different view.

Height Capital Markets analysts Chase White and Clayton Allen wrote in a note, citing news reports suggesting the order will address Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the liability shield intended to protect Internet platforms from content posted on their sites.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing some interesting action in twitter shares premarket…

…buybacks?

But whatever happens, we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the Ayatollah’s twitter feed. Will the company dare to apply these misinformation labels to Iran’s supreme leader?

The decision of Twitter to mark some of Donald Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots with notices implying they contained misinformation, may have been welcomed by the many critics of the US president, but some say the move was short-sighted. After all, how does Trump differ from any other public figure whose tweets may need to be ‘corrected’ with a ‘fact check’?

Apparently, in at least one case, Twitter couldn’t come up with a good answer, and instead chose to issue more notices. It dug up some March tweets by Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, who infamously accused the US military of possibly starting the Covid-19 epidemic by bringing the coronavirus into his country.

Twitter has been labeling what it believes to be Covid-19 misinformation on its platform since mid-May, but those particular notices were issued on purpose. At least that’s what the New York Post believes, saying it was done after they confronted Twitter about its apparent double standards in targeting Trump and not the Chinese official.

Quite a few commentators pointed out that Twitter is putting itself in a vulnerable position by getting involved in what is essentially a political quarrel – regardless of whether Trump delivers on his threat to “regulate or shut down” social media in retaliation.

Twitter’s move against Trump’s tweet is probably horrifying to fellow social media giant Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, responded to it by reiterating in an interview with Fox News his long-held position that private companies shouldn’t be “the arbiter of truth.”

His counterpart at Twitter, Jack Dorsey, insists that his company is not taking on that role. “Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves,” he tweeted.