Misinformation is everywhere at the moment.
If your uncle sends you a message on Whatsapp saying the coronavirus can be cured with disinfectant or treated with an uproved drug, and that social distancing is worse than Covid-19 itself, you’d probably just sigh in frustration and mute him for the next year.
But what if it was the President of the United States who said this on live television?
The problem with Trump is that he often dismisses those who oppose him, and labels them as “FAKE NEWS” when they do.
So what will he do when he is labelled fake news?
Exactly what you think.
Trump Regulating or Shutting Down Social Media Firms After His Tweet got Fact-Checked & It’s Not an Empty Threat
As you probably know, Trump does not like being told he’s wrong.
So when Twitter added a fact-checker tag to some of his tweets, Trump lost his mind and threatened to regulate or shut down social media firms.
On 26 May, Trump tweeted that Mail-in ballots are “substantially fraudulent” and that it would lead to a “Rigged Election”.
Trump was referring to the 2020 United States Presidential election and the proposal by many states for voters to mail in their ballots from their homes, rather than visit physical voting booths.
For some unknown reason, Trump believes that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.
Since there’s no evidence for this claim, Twitter decided to add a fact-checker warning to his tweets, with a link to a short article debunking Trump’s false claims.
This infuriated the world’s most orange politician, and he published a series of tweets accusing Twitter of interfering with the election and stifling free speech.
….Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Now, the US president is expected to sign an executive order aimed at social media companies, with some fearing that it will target a 24-year-old statute that protects the companies from lawsuits.
In case you don’t know, an executive order is a rule or order issued by the president to an executive branch of the government and has the force of law, even though it’s not actual legislation.
There are no additional details on the order as of yet.
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Came Too Late?
While Trump and his supporters have been lambasting Twitter, many on the other side felt Twitter was too slow to respond to his abusive, false, or inflammatory tweets.
On Tuesday, for instance, Trump suggested that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have murdered one of his aides.
….about whether or not Joe could have done such a horrible thing? Maybe or maybe not, but I find Joe to be a total Nut Job, and I knew him well, far better than most. So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
The president claims that Scarborough killed a woman he was having an affair with in 2001 when she was working under him as a Republican congressman, according to CNA.
There is no evidence for this accusation, of course.
The deceased woman, Lori Klausutis, was found dead after she hit her head during a fall in Scarborough’s office. Investigators concluded it was due to an abnormal heart rhythm.
The woman’s widowed husband wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him to delete Trump’s “vicious lie”.
This insane, baseless accusation may have led to the fact-checking of his subsequent tweets.
Surprisingly though, it’s not just Trump supporters who are on his side in this debate.
Zuckerberg-ed
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and alien pretending to be a human, criticized Twitter for fact-checking Trump’s tweets, saying “private companies “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth.”
Trump happily shared this on his Twitter page.
Then again, this is a guy who sold $100,000 in ads to fake Russian Facebook accounts during the 2016 presidential election, so we shouldn’t really listen to him when it comes to the spread of misinformation.
In any case, there’s only one question on everyone’s minds now: will Trump really shut down social media just because two of his tweets were fact-checked?
Is he really that petty?
If you’re still asking this question in 2020, then you’ve been reading too much fake news.
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