Twitter is an important aspect of leadership. Confused?!
Here’s what I am saying: Communication is a major factor for leading and influencing people- From Hitler to Martin Luther Jr. to our very own Bapu, history says it all. The importance of communication has remained constant, the ways changed.
Now we’ve social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook for communicating and leaders like Mr Trump, Mr Modi who use these platforms to communicate with their supporters, regarding their decisions, views and opinions.
But recently, something went wrong with Mr Trump or I would rather say Twitter i.e. Trump v/s Twitter.
The Story
Twitter is a platform where users share content. Twitter is not a publisher, which means people don’t require approval from Twitter to post anything, granting them freedom of speech. Also, Twitter and other social media platforms are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of the US. This Act protects these Internet Cos. from being sued over due to the content that appears on their platforms and allows content moderation pointing that these Cos. can have internal rules to remove content posted by someone, but such action by the company should be done in good faith.
So, Twitter has its own rules for the protection of its users which restricts people to use violent threats, abusive language, glorify violence, conduct illegal activities like terrorism through Twitter.
But here’s a catch, there are certain exceptions to the rules, for the elected and government officials which enables them to discuss their actions and statements on Twitter because Twitter considers these matters to be of public interest. So if you and I post the same tweets given below as posted by Mr Trump, Twitter might take it down, or kick us out of the platform.
However, there’s a difference between you, me and Mr Trump, his tweets being of public interest. Therefore, Twitter doesn’t take the above actions, it places a notice informing users about the rule violation and people can click through the notice to view the tweet.
So recently, Twitter added a fact-check warning on two of the tweets by Mr Trump.
The fact-check warning means the claim by Mr Trump against the opposition might be misleading. This action by Twitter made Mr Trump furious. And here’s how in a classic Trump style, he replied on Twitter to Twitter.
That’s not it, the employees of Twitters started getting death threats from Trump’s supporters after this, to which the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey came up and replied;
Mr Trump says that these platforms are taking away the freedom of speech by censoring content. The story is not over yet, being the President of U.S., he went on to sign an order which will remove the protection given to these the companies under Section 230. Which means that these social media platforms can be considered as publishers of content and could be held liable (can be sued) for the content posted on their platforms by the users.
To which, The Centre for Democracy and Technology (A nonprofit advocacy group partially funded by the Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter) has filed a lawsuit challenging Mr Trump’s order claiming that it violates the First Amendment of the Constitution (Freedom of Speech).
“First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Well, nothing can stop Mr Trump from tweeting. Amidst all this, here’s another tweet he tweeted for the protests happening in America against the death of George Floyd :
But Twitter has also not stopped from tagging it as glorifying violence, what it finds could be harmful to its users. Twitter has also started gaining support from other tech companies like Snapchat. After these tweets, Snapchat has stopped promoting Mr Trump’s account on its Discover content platform as it considers the tweets inciting racial violence.
Let’s see where this war goes, will it take down these social media platforms and take away the freedom of speech on the Internet? Or rather can Mr Trump stop tweeting?
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