It happened again: President Donald Trump used Twitter to address the violence in Minneapolis and Twitter's editorial department didn't like it.
There are dangerous violent riots happening right now in Minneapolis after the recent death of a black suspect, George Floyd, at the hands of a white recently-fired police officer, Derek Chauvin. The city is literally on fire. People are unsafe and need serious help.
That's when Trump spoke up.
In a tweet posted around 1 a.m. Friday, as protesters in Minneapolis burned down a police station and other buildings, President Donald Trump tweeted:
"I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right....."
Twitter then flagged Trump's tweet with the following message: "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. Learn more"
But a Tweet promising to bring in the National Guard to protect innocent people from lawless anarchists isn't "glorifying violence."
In fact, it's doing the exact opposite. When people are being threatened by looters, arsonists, and rioters, a suggestion from our President that the National Guard may need to be deployed to protect the innocent is a statement that disavows violence.
Not only is it insulting to the law-abiding citizens of Minneapolis who don't want to see their city destroyed, it's also disrespectful to the men and women of the National Guard, who took an oath to protect our country.
Twitter labeled anti-violence speech as "glorifying violence", a confusing and reckless move, but what they're doing is also arguably illegal.
Yesterday Trump issued an executive order to crackdown on online censorship from social media platforms and Twitter has reacted to that news like a child having a temper tantrum.
Before we all get carried away with the Constitutional arguments about Trump’s executive order against platforms like Twitter, the First Amendment generally does not apply to private companies. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation. Remember when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a Congressional testimony back in 2017? We're repeating history because the general public doesn't seem to care enough to remember what happened two years ago.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter from legal consequences made by the users on their playtform, but under the law it was also assumed they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication, not curators of acceptable opinion.
In order to be protected by Section 230, companies like Twitter should be ‘neutral public forums.’ By fact checking Trump’s opinion, or labeling Trump's words as messages that insight violence, Twitter is trying to influence public opinion. They're not impartial and Twitter is not an open channel of communication. They are literally becoming curators of acceptable opinion, the exact thing they weren't supposed to do under Section 230.
Twitter isn't acting in the best interests of free speech, non-partisanship, or the public's general safety. They're putting their differences with Trump before everything else, and it's the people of Minneapolis who will suffer.
Flames rise from a liquor store near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a protest over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes. - A police precinct in Minnesota went up in flames late on May 28 in a third day of demonstrations as the so-called Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seethed over the shocking police killing of a handcuffed black man. The precinct, which police had abandoned, burned after a group of protesters pushed through barriers around the building, breaking windows and chanting slogans. A much larger crowd demonstrated as the building went up in flames. (Photo by Kerem Yucel / AFP) (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)