President Trump falls foul of Twitter’s own war on fake news
Overnight there came a development that might be as significant as it was easy to miss. After months of users screaming for Twitter to do something about the malicious tweets of the President of the United States, software engineers finally reworked their code to allow Twitter to annotate Donald Trump’s words. It might be overlooked in the general hubbub of the news cycle because the sanctions seem mild compared to the more censorious actions that many had demanded.
In recent days, Trump has been circulating some long-disproven and wilfully cruel conspiracy theories about the MSNBC host and former Republican congressman, Joe Scarborough, and the death of his aide, Lori Klausutis, back in 2001. Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition and after returning to the office after a run, passed out, hit her head on a desk, and died. It was ruled at the time that there had been no foul play but, unsurprisingly, the story has been refashioned by right-wing conspiracy sites. As Scarborough has become an outspoken critic of President, so the allegations have grown in their volume and their spite.
Trump, himself, has become increasingly unsubtle in his smears. “Psycho Joe Scarborough is rattled,” he tweeted out on Wednesday. “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. He knows what is happening!” It’s grubby stuff which led last week to a complaint to Twitter from Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, and then, on Monday, an emotional letter from Klausutis’s husband, Timothy. They wanted the tweets struck down whilst others have called for Donald Trump to be issued with warnings and, perhaps even, banished from the platform.
The politics of this are typically overheated but the debate goes well beyond the normal red and blue hostilities, beyond even the morality of the President’s actions. This is a matter of how we all take our news and the role of medium holders in the dissemination of political messaging.
Some will say that the annotations added to two of Trump’s tweets about election fraud are a minor development. Why would the President worry about the strange blue asterisked footnotes that appeared on his tweets last night? Why should he be worried that his readers might click and “[g]et the facts about mail-in ballots”? The annotations don’t feel strong enough to warrant controversy yet you also cannot annotate without editorialising. What Twitter is now doing to the President of the United States is a very big deal.
Trump responded with typically extreme language. “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” Yet he’s hardly the first to raise such objections. When Alexander Pope mocked the hacks of Grub Street back in the eighteenth century, he was also mocking editors as well. The Dunciad, his long mock-heroic poem, is consumed by the annotations leading off into pseudo-learning that gets in the way of the reader’s understanding of the poem. It’s a trick that Vladimir Nabokov repeated in the twentieth century with his brilliant literary experiment, Pale Fire, a novel that is part satire, part puzzle entirely told in the form of footnotes to a poem.
The sequence of Trump, Nabokov, Pope, might sound ridiculous but Twitter’s problem is merely the most recent example of a dilemma that has haunted textual criticism for centuries. Artists chronicling flights of fancy often feel aggrieved when editors root their meaning back in the mundane stuff of the everyday world. Keats would probably match Trump’s fury if he saw his line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all. / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” given a footnote explaining what you do not “need to know” about how, when, where, and why he wrote it.
The tension, then, between expression and explanation is hardly a new one. It’s even found in the foundation of Protestantism which privileged revelation through sola scriptura (individual interpretation of the Bible) rather than the Catholic tradition of scriptural authority married with the magisterium of church authorities. Jump forward a few centuries and we then have modern academic research which relies on citations to establish facts already proven.
This why Trumpism is as much a problem of textual authority as it is a story about politics, celebrity, or dark money. “Fake news” has never been an attack on properly fake news (the “real” news that Trump tweets out) as it is an attempt to neutralise the objectivity of journalism, where facts need to be verified against numerous sources. Last night, Twitter took an important step towards instilling that objectivity in its medium. There is no easy way of doing what they are now doing without appearing to put a thumb on the scale of public opinion.
Now acting as the arbiter of truth between the President and his audience, Twitter has placed itself in a difficult position. It’s right to do so but it must now show they can apply the same objectivity to all.