TWTR Twitter Inc

By Deepa Seetharaman 

Twitter Inc.'s move to label two tweets by President Trump as misinformation highlights a widening divide among big tech platforms on how they handle political speech, an increasingly contentious issue as the U.S. presidential election approaches.

The messaging platform's decision to slap a fact-checking label Tuesday on the two tweets, in which Mr. Trump said vote-by-mail would lead to rampant fraud, contrasts sharply with the position by larger rival Facebook Inc., which reviewed the same claim from the president on its platform and found it complied with its rules.

Both companies for years have been reluctant to restrain speech by politicians and leaders on their platforms, seeking to avoid becoming what Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has described as the "arbiter of truth." While Facebook has emphasized its commitment to a more hands-off approach stance over the past year, Twitter dropped political ads altogether last year and now is taking the unprecedented step of weighing in on the truth of statements by Mr. Trump, its most powerful and controversial user.

The perils of the approach were immediately apparent. Mr. Trump on Wednesday vowed to take "big action" against Twitter for its move, and his allies criticized a senior Twitter policy executive for harsh past tweets deriding the president and his followers.

The critics argued that the executive, Yoel Roth, who is the company's head of site integrity, overseeing Twitter's efforts to address bots and spam, is an example of left-leaning bias at Twitter. They cited his past tweets, including one from 2016 in which he called Mr. Trump a "racist tangerine" and another from 2017 when he compared White House adviser Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi's minister of propaganda.

Mr. Trump has been considering establishing a panel to review complaints of anticonservative bias on social media, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Speaking on "Fox & Friends" Wednesday morning, Ms. Conway mentioned Mr. Roth by name and recited his Twitter handle on air. "Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up and tell him he's about to get more followers."

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company supported Mr. Roth and didn't plan to suspend or fire him. "No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions," said Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's top policy official, tweeted. "We are a team with different points of view and we stand behind our people and our decisions to protect the health of the public conversation on our platform."

Mr. Roth didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump planned to sign an executive order Thursday related to social media, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters on the flight Wednesday to Washington from Florida, where Mr. Trump traveled to witness a space launch that was subsequently called off. She didn't provide further details.

Democrats and other critics of Mr. Trump generally approved Twitter's decision to label the tweets, but said Twitter and Facebook alike had to take a tougher stance on his posts that they say go against the platforms' rules on misinformation and abuse.

"Effective technology regulation cannot be conducted on the emotional whims of a single leader," Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) said on Twitter. "This disagreement is exactly why we need thoughtful policies to consistently limit misinformation, instead of ad hoc fact checks whenever the headlines push Twitter hard enough."

The controversy and opprobrium from all sides is one reason why platforms previously have avoided taking stands on speech by Mr. Trump and other officials and prominent politicians.

"None of them want to make these calls on world leaders or anybody in political power," said Bridget Barrett, who researches tech companies' policies at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "A kind reading of that is it's based on freedom of speech. To give a less kind reading of that, they want to stay friends with the folks who are regulating them."

The tweets targeted by Twitter, which Mr. Trump posted early Tuesday, read "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In-Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent," and, later, "This will be a Rigged Election."

Hours later, Twitter attached a small label to the tweets saying "Get the facts about mail-in ballots," and a link to more information. That information said fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud and all states offer some form of mail-in absentee voting.

Mr. Trump cross-posted the same claims to Facebook, which has said it doesn't fact-check speech by politicians. Where it can, Facebook relies on third-party fact-checkers to determine whether claims posted on the site are accurate. The company recently created an independent oversight board that will have a chance to review and possibly overturn the company's decisions.

There are exceptions to Facebook's rules. If a politician posts something that violates Facebook's rules around voter or census interference, the company will remove it, the spokesman said. In this week's case, Mr. Trump's posts didn't violate those guidelines, the spokesman added.

"We believe that people should be able to have a robust debate about the electoral process, which is why we have crafted our policies to focus on misrepresentations that would interfere with the vote," a Facebook spokesman said Wednesday.

Ms. Barrett said the post appeared to her to violate two of Facebook's rules around voter interference, which bar posts that misrepresent methods for voting and whether a vote will be counted, among other things.

The Facebook spokesman declined to comment on that view.

Ms. Barrett said that the platforms were in an inherently difficult position. "It shouldn't fall on Facebook to protect Democracy and it shouldn't fall on Twitter to protect vote-by-mail laws," she said. "That's a deeply political failing that they're caught in the middle of."

Mr. Trump said Twitter's move reflected bias at the tech platforms. "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen," he tweeted Wednesday. "Clean up your act, NOW!!!!"

The president didn't specify how he might seek to take action. He has repeatedly threatened consequences for social-media companies that he has accused of discriminating against conservatives without following through, and experts say there is little the president can do to change the way social-media companies operate.

Earlier this month, he tweeted that the "Radical Left" was in "total command & control" of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google and said the administration was "working to remedy this illegal situation." Days later, the Journal reported that Mr. Trump was thinking about the panel to review complaints of anticonservative bias on social media.

The vote-by-mail episode came in the midst of debate over a separate set of tweets from the president suggesting that former lawmaker and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had played a role in the 2001 death of a congressional aide. The widower of the aide publicly requested that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey take down the tweets, saying Mr. Trump was using his wife's memory for "perceived political gain." Twitter later said it wouldn't take action on the posts related to Mr. Scarborough.

Wednesday, at a Twitter shareholder meeting, executives were twice asked about their handling of the tweets. Mr. Dorsey said Twitter was trying to incentivize healthy debate on the platform, but the company wanted to give people a chance to respond to politicians.

"We also believe that it's important that people have conversations around what's happening, especially with our global leaders that they can push back, that they can speak truth to power that they can share and show why this particular behavior is not right, not just," Mr. Dorsey said.

--Rebecca Ballhaus and Kristina Peterson contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 27, 2020 19:38 ET (23:38 GMT)

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