TWITTER DEFLATES TRUMP’S EGO WITH ‘UNSUBSTANTIATED’ TAG ON TWEETS

The Dublin, Ireland-based Twitter has finally punched US President Donald Trump right smack on the nose by tagging two of his tweets, one on mail-in voting as a “fraud” and another on “rigged elections” in California, as “unsubstantiated” like thousands of his tweets since taking over the White House in January 2017, the Agence France Presse (AFP) reported on May 27, 2020.

AFP said “under the tweets, Twitter posted a link which read ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots’ and which took users to a notice calling the claims ‘unsubstantiated,’ citing reporting by CNN, the Washington Post and other media. Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to 'Rigged Election,'” the notice contended. "However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud."

Twitter, which is owned by Jack Dorsey, tagged the two tweets on Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila), the first time it has done so, and Trump furiously reacted to Twitter’s exercise of its right to regulate messages on its cyberspace as he insisted the company was "interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election," and added: "Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!" he tweeted.

Commenting on the brazen slight on the bloated Trump ego, Nick Corasaniti of The New York Times said in the column “On Politics” on May 27, 2020 that “I don’t think they should ban him, and I’ve talked about that before. I think they should just be taking down certain tweets and doing one-offs and making an example of it. And by the way, the First Amendment says ‘Congress shall make no law’ — not Twitter shall make no law. Twitter can make as many laws as it wants. It is a private platform, even though it seems like the public square.”

Talking about the abusive tweets and the use of cyberspace to propagandize authoritarianism, Corasaniti said “So far, no. I mean, of course, I think the danger is a Donald Trump who is a little smarter. He’s kind of sloppy and mean. But you see it across the world. [President Rodrigo] Duterte [of the Philippines] uses Facebook quite a lot. So, there’s a lot happening, we just don’t live there… I do think that it is happening already and people who have bad intentions have been gaming the system for a while — we just haven’t seen it as much here.”