It turns out there is a way to get President Donald Trump off Twitter. All that has to happen is for him to lose the US presidency. Now we know. And now that he has lost, it is heartening to know that Facebook and Twitter, two of the greatest titans of the tech empire, have found their spines.
The Washington Post calculated that Trump has told 25,000 lies in the past few years. Most of those, until now, have never been fact-checked by social networks, which have been too afraid of the tweeter-in-chief.
Finally, instead of allowing his rampant lies and misinformation, Twitter hid Trump’s tweets behind a warning: "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process." One was labelled: "This claim about election fraud is disputed."
These two statements are true for just about everything he has ever said, including his very first public rant about the US presidency: his early claim that former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii.
Social networks have never fact-checked Trump’s posts
Trump is a liar, a bully and a narcissist. Not only has he forced US politics to take seriously those feeble-minded lawmakers who live on Planet Republican (see any of the engagements by Congress with the big tech firms about "censoring conservatives" for proof), but he’s drawn the world’s discourse into the gutter that is Planet Trump. In this alternative reality, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un — who described theirs as "a special friendship" — was sent 27 "love letters" by Trump, who told a rally in September 2018: "I was really being tough and so was he. And we would go back and forth … He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. And then we fell in love." Meanwhile, despite warnings that Russia was trying to manipulate this month’s US elections, as it did in 2016, Trump declared of President Vladimir Putin: "I like Putin, he likes me."
Of course, this is going to be a torrid time in US politics as the master social media manipulator (with nearly 90-million Twitter followers) is expected to go on an angry rant — declaring the elections were stolen, fighting perceived foes, blaming the "lamestream media" and claiming conservative voices are being silenced on social media. You know — with all the usual dignity and inclusivity that Trump’s four years of hell have shown us — what is to be expected from the man with such small fingers. Expect pardons for political allies, racists and white supremacists, as well as a range of other wacky Trumpisms.
Conceivably, he can’t issue any more executive orders against social media firms — or ones that can’t be defeated in court before January 20 next year — but those are likely to be signed by him anyway.
Perhaps the tweet that sums up the Trump years so well – and with his trademark disregard for grammar, fact and intelligence — is this one from last Saturday: "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT."
- Shapshak is publisher of Stuff and Scrolla.Africa
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