TwitFace

Two items on the news made me blink this week: Facebook now has 2.6bn readers per month and Twitter whacked a fact check link onto President Trump’s tweet about postal voting in California.

Hard to believe I know but Trump was propagating a lie and Twitter says that this goes against its civic integrity policy. This prevents tweeters from “manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes, such as by posting misleading information that could dissuade people from participating in an election”.

Trump is now doing what Trump does, getting outraged and as the Yanks say ‘doubling down’ on Twitter, by tweeting the lie again and shouting that it’s an attack on free speech and that he “will not allow it to happen.” Trump without the ability to lie to his millions of followers would be, well, to nick a word from the Covid lexicon, unprecedented. He is threatening to use an executive order – Trump is fond of those, makes him feel like Putin – to remove the protection social media companies have that limits their liability from user-posted content.

According to Internet World Stats (.com) there are 7.6bn people in the world and 4.6bn of them are online. Facebook gets half of them – every month. Mr Zuckerberg, sat on his billions of users, is a little worried about all this, as he really doesn’t want to be personally responsible for whatever half the world’s internet users might say.

“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”

But as Trump would say; “sad”.

It seems though that Trump can’t actually do what he’s threatening because he isn’t Putin and he can’t change the law unilaterally. He can huff and puff quite a lot though. It’s going to get sticky in TwitFace land.