Opinion: Twitter’s New Policy on Information

Twitter took an active role in the battle against misinformation ignited controversy on Tuesday (5/26/2020) by putting a fact-check label on President Trump’s tweet stating his opinion that mail-in voting would lead to election fraud. The “label” had a link directing users to “Get the facts on mail-in ballots.”

Instead of taking a stance on whether this was right or wrong, I think it would be best to take a step back and look at comparable comments or tweets and see what Twitter would have flagged if another President had been tweeting during their own time in office.

I believe Twitter should have shown some additional research or case studies on past Presidents’ comments on other mediums and compare their “tweetable” remarks to Trump’s commentary. To have a proper reaction to this policy change, we should have a baseline of how this change could have impacted previous presidents and how this could affect future political candidates.*

*I believe the past would be more informative and then predicting future outcomes given how nascent this policy is.

Seeing past newspaper, or another mass communication channel quotes from previous Presidents and their directional impact on the community afterward would have been great to share more publicly leading up to this policy update.

I understand there wouldn’t be a clean way to quantify the direct impact of hypothetical tweets from the past, but having this information and flagging as a directional observation would speak to the mission Twitter is trying to accomplish, which is just labeling information. It would have also helped shift the attention away from a conversation around Trump vs. social media platforms to how we should enrich mass-information to the public.

People benefit from objective labels. It helps us create context around information before we apply it to everyday situations — for example, toxic or poison warning labels. Without warning labels, we would probably have a lot more cases or calls to the American Association of Poison Control due to the color of some household products.

The internet has given people a choice to decide on what information they want to hear or engage with a dialogue. However, as a collective, we have not created a means of objectively labeling information, a way of distinguishing a fact from opinion. I believe this work is in the right direction, but not the end solution. I think people who have the attention of millions, or billions, should be kept to a higher standard, but in doing so, the enforcer of the higher standard should be transparent about why they are doing so and back it with data.