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by colinmorelli 2213 days ago
I think "preserving the words of the president" probably fits pretty squarely in the realm of public interest, even if they're blatantly false.
6 comments

Removing it from the normal tweet status is separate from preserving them. They could archive them and disable replies, retweets, quotes, and so on. They could remove it from feeds. They could frame it differently.
I know for a fact my aunt mails in ballots for her husband, her father and her mother. Claiming that there is no mail-in voter fraud among 300 million Americans is quite absurd in my opinion.
I didn’t say there’s zero voter fraud. I said his tweet, which suggests that more mail in ballots will lead to “substantial fraud” is false.

That said, perhaps “unsubstantiated” is a better description.

It's a bit absurd when claims of rampant mail-in voter fraud come without evidence from a New Yorker in the District of Columbia who votes in Florida by mail.
So assuming this is true, two things.

One, why haven't you reported your aunt for voter fraud? Voter fraud is a very serious issue and it seems to me that you're letting a criminal go free. This can be easily verified by telling the government and having the three others confirm who they voted for.

For two, if she is mailing in the ballots, then is she forging their signature as well as collecting their SSNs? Or are they simply signing on the ballots themselves agreeing to the votes? In which case is that truly fraud or not? If she's forging signatures then she's also committing identity theft which is a very serious issue, one that I hope you agree deserves reporting.

Snitches get cross stitches. Don't report your family - talk to them.
I joke with my kids that it’s snitches get ditches to amp up the nonsense level.
Not really, no. That's the WH's obligation, not Twitter's.

Jack Dorsey's public interest is increasing engagement and making money. That's it.

Especially if, I would say.
That's not Twitter's job. There are people who are supposed to do this.
When you have become one of the de-facto news sources for a sizable portion of the population, it does sort of become your job.

Whether it’s good that they have become a news source or not is a valid question. But right now, they are, and I think preserving the president’s tweets seems like a pretty easily defensible decision. Even if it is also (or primarily) motivated by their own business interests.

Do you need Twitter to preserve the words of the President, though? Rephrasing, can the President’s words be preserved just as well without Twitter?

If the answer is yes then Twitter isn’t performing the civil service it claims as it is not an archival medium.

Giving him a platform in the first place is what necessitates the consequent fact checking. If they didn't distribute his lies they wouldn't need to contradict them. Many media outlets have stopped airing Trump's statements live, because doing so is essentially unethical.