On Friday last week, I drafted a post in response to Twitter fact-checking these Trump tweets about mail-in-voting:
Here is what I wrote:
These are crazy, misinformed tweets – not surprising given the last three years – but I’m not ready to give this kind of power to Twitter, even on their own platform. Twitter can’t possibly sift through all the conjecture and ambiguous statements that are made on the site – correct all the misstated facts, or fake news articles you want, but I don’t know of any info out there that can prove that mail boxes won’t be robbed, or that we won’t have a rigged election. Sure, the average, rational adult can see that mail ballots are necessary tools for an election when many of us are home, and should trust that the process can be done with integrity. But are we ready for similar disclaimers on tweets from Bernie and Warren?
Then Friday, Saturday and Sunday happened. Protests sprouted in most major cities and many turned violent. Trump tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and you don’t need to read this NPR explainer to understand that the statement is plucked right from our racist history.
On Sunday, my post seemed out of touch – out of touch with the moment and with how I really felt about the issue. Eroded norms and principles lead to a further erosion of norms and principles, and sometimes the guttural response – take that f*cking tweet down before some kid sees themselves referred to that way – is the right one. Sometimes the appeal to somebody’s humanity is not a cheap debate trick, to be countered with a constitutional argument, but a genuine cry for help.
Also, as Jonah Goldberg put it in The Baltimore Sun, “Twitter isn’t a government entity, so in a legal sense it can’t commit censorship. The First Amendment binds what the government can do, not private companies.” So my original argument was also sloppy.
The truth is that I don’t really care how Twitter handles Trump’s tweets. They are all absolute garbage. I don’t go on Twitter. And just because Twitter has become the virtual public square doesn’t mean it should be. Another truth is that I like to hear myself talk, and I like to think that my arguments are the smart, rational ones. But oftentimes irrational arguments are the ones that we need.
One thing that I have found myself doing more and more since Trump’s election is defending arguments for the sake of it. Searching for reasons why the impeachment hearings were flawed. Criticizing the media’s portrayal of Trump’s presidency. Not because I disagree with the message, but because I don’t want to see the country descend into this type of trash behavior for the rest of my life.
The problem is, tweets like the one below are trash behavior. They are wrong. And at some point, defending someone’s right to put that online, in the name of the US government, puts me on the wrong side of history. Twitter created its platform, and what Twitter created it can take away. Let it do so.
