Trump threatens to shred the First Amendment to defend 'free speech'
— Donald J. Trump “Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them is correct,” Trump added Wednesday morning. “Big action to follow!” Of course, Trump couldn’t care less about “FREE SPEECH.
” Adding a fact-check option to some of Trump’s tweets is a form of exercising the right to free speech. Trump moving to “regulate” Twitter’s ability to fact check him — or, worse, to “close them down” over it — would constitute a blatant infringement of the First Amendment that not even the most MAGA-friendly court in America could rationalize as constitutional. Trump may well be making empty threats — but those threats alone will probably suffice. Simply floating the idea of impropriety will get his followers riled up and put pressure on social media platforms to cow to his demands, or risk being perceived as biased. It has worked before. Republicans feeling like Twitter is silencing conservative voices, as Trump wrote on Wednesday, is largely the result of his own previous complaints and threats against the platform. There’s no actual substance to the grievances. Like his entire presidency, it’s a self-perpetuating carousel of bullshit. Every time it swings back around, it seems a little more legitimate because people remember hearing about it on the first pass, or the second, or the third. Trump is trying to pull off the same con with his Twitter campaign to get Florida law enforcement to open up a “Cold Case” against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. Since early this month, Trump has been tweeting incessantly about a debunked conspiracy theory that, when Scarborough was a member of the House of Representatives, he murdered one of his staffers, Lori Klausutis. In reality, Klausutis suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition, fell in the office, and hit her head on a desk. Last week, Klausutis’ husband, Dr. Timothy J. Klausutis, wrote a letter asking Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove the posts. “The President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” Klausutis wrote,. Many agreed with Klausutis, and the letter reignited calls for the social media giant to hold the president to the same standards as the rest of its user base. Twitter would be well within its rights to do so. The platform’s terms of service prohibit targeted harassment and hateful conduct. Trump is clearly in violation of both, and if he is going to choose to post on Twitter, he is subjecting himself to the platform’s discretion over how to enforce its rules. But Twitter has refused to take action throughout his presidency, and refused to do so again in response to Klausutis. “We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter representative. “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.” The same day, the fact-check option appeared on Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting. It’s a welcome change, but also a far less drastic step than deleting his posts about Klausutis, which continued Wednesday morning. “Psycho Joe Scarborough is rattled, not only by his bad ratings but all of the things and facts that are coming out on the internet about opening a Cold Case,” the president wrote. “He knows what is happening!”
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