It’s Time To Stop Pretending Twitter Is Neutral

Twitter’s decision this week to append a disclaimer to President Trump’s tweets about the risks of mail-in ballot fraud should be enough, at long last, for us to dispense with the fiction that Twitter is nothing more than a neutral platform.

It’s not, it never has been, and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

Set aside the relative merits of Trump’s comments and the entire debate about whether mass voting by mail is a good idea, because that’s not what’s important here. By stepping in to flag Trump’s tweet with a warning label and a link so users can “get the facts” about mail-in ballots (which ironically links to a CNN article by Chris Cillizza), Twitter abandoned any claim it had to being a neutral facilitator. It crossed over, in other words, from being a supposedly unbiased social media platform to being a traditional publisher—in this case, a publisher with a very clear editorial position.

This has been true for some time now. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley is politically progressive and, as Vox reported Wednesday, its top executives are working hard to elect presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The only difference now is that Twitter decided to make it bone-crushingly obvious. Social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google have been censoring and editorializing for years under the absurd pretext that they were just enforcing their own “community guidelines,” not weighing in on the merits of what their users were saying or embedding their own biases into the site’s rules.

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Here’s why that’s a big deal. For decades, social media companies have wanted to have it both ways. They wanted to be able to enjoy liability protections that traditional publishers don’t have while censoring opinions they don’t like and promoting those they do.

They’ve been able to do this in part thanks to federal law. Back in the late 1990s when the internet was young, Congress exempted Internet companies from liability for publishing things that were inaccurate or potentially libelous, so long as they were uploaded by a third party.

Specifically, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, protects companies like Twitter from being sued for allowing users to post crazy conspiracy theories, malicious lies, and outright falsehoods.

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All of this to say, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other tech giants with massive social media platforms obviously have an editorial slant, much like the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN. Unlike those outlets, however, these tech firms have been able to hide behind the canard that they’re just providing a space for third parties to exchange ideas, so they can’t be held liable for what their users post.

No more. If Twitter wants to start fact-checking everything that gets posted by influential people, fine. But there’s no way it can do so in an even-handed or fair manner, and no way it can continue to insist on Section 230 protections.

As Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said Wednesday, “It’s pretty simple: if Twitter and Google and the rest are going to editorialize and censor and act like traditional publishers, they should be treated like traditional publishers and stop receiving the special carve out from the federal government in Section 230.”