Reading Trump's executive order titled "PREVENTING ONLINE CENSORSHIP" is a journey into the surreal. In classic Trumpian fashion, the document is mostly a misdirection; In ominous language, it addresses a subject that lies outside the president's nitwitted dispute with Twitter:
"In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick [sic] the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power."
Most impressive and powerfully patriotic — except Twitter did not "hand pick [Trump's] speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet." What it did was to clarify and correct official authoritarian disinformation of the sort that one would expect to vomit from the diseased organs of Pyongyang.
It's all quite ironic and characteristically hypocritical of Trump, in that just two months ago his reelection "campaign sent cease and desist letters to TV stations to try to get them to stop airing [a Biden super PAC] ad criticizing his coronavirus response." Now that's censorship.
But let us not totally despair over Trump's tantrum of a retaliatory executive order, for it also contains quality entertainment:
"As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets [with a warning label]."
No further comment is necessary.
I await Trump’s Twitter war with gravity. Fake laws of physics don’t you know.
Posted by: Peter G | May 29, 2020 at 11:39 AM