Social Media’s Dance With Donald Trump Is Getting Clumsier

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As I type these words, the 2020 presidential election has not yet been officially called. But unofficially, the current occupant of the White House has declared victory and simultaneously charged that the process was crooked. Contradictions aside, Facebook and Twitter’s policies frown on attempts to overthrow democratic institutions. So, they have to decide what to do about it. Should they amplify misleading statements about who won a given state—or, in the president’s case, a claim that he “hereby” claims Michigan, a state he lost? Or leave his posts up because they are newsworthy?

Generally, they are putting warning labels on such utterances, like the asides you hear from your NPR commentator that the upcoming story might be upsetting. To some, it’s censorship. To others, it’s a useless speed bump. Nobody is happy, especially Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, who endlessly claim that they are not qualified to be the world’s arbiters of speech.

They should have thought of that before they built global platforms based on amplifying the speech of anyone, from pawn to president.

For the past few months, the platforms’ treatment of controversial speech has been severely scrutinized. Officials on both sides of the legislative aisle have been demanding changes to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which lets companies like Facebook and Twitter moderate the speech of its users without having to take responsibility for the content in the way traditional publishers have to. One complaint is that this gives the platforms the ability to employ bias without taking responsibility. A lot of the unhappiness with the platforms came after the 2016 election, where Facebook in particular was called out for possibly affecting the election by not policing disinformation and failing to recognize Russian interference.

Facebook took a lot of steps to improve its performance in 2020. One can debate how well it did, but it’s definitely a step forward that we just had an election and not everyone is blaming Mark Zuckerberg for the outcome, as happened in 2016. True, Facebook deservedly got heat for its policy of allowing politicians to lie in their ads. But I haven’t yet seen that policy cited as a factor in any particular race. It’s almost as if candidate disinformation is automatically factored into our elections these days.

What’s been happening after the election, though, has turned out to be a trickier dilemma. Starting with how to handle Donald Trump. For years, the companies have been involved in an intricate dance with his impulsive and often transgressive micro-rants. Both Zuckerberg and Dorsey concluded that the newsworthiness of presidential speech allowed Trump to say hateful things that violate policy and otherwise would have been blocked. But it turns out that when Trump got into stuff that really violated policy—like Covid or election misinformation, or what might be interpreted as calls to violence—Facebook and Twitter began to place warning labels on his posts. Since the election, those labels have been applied in bulk. Sometimes, if you clicked through to see the posts, you might see an external correction. When Trump tweeted, “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Twitter added a note, “Some votes may still need to be counted,” with a link to its civic integrity policy, which explained why the tweet you were reading doesn’t really belong on Twitter. When Trump falsely charged that votes are being stolen, Facebook slapped a label saying, “Election officials follow strict rules when it comes to ballot counting, handling, and reporting.”

It’s weird for the god-like voice of a global platform to contradict a president’s speech. But simply blocking the posts is even more problematic. These Trump-isms are more newsworthy than ever. Shouldn’t we hear it if our leader is trying to discredit a lawful election? On the other hand, it might be tempting to yield to those who demand that as a serial policy violator, Trump should be banned. It’s not like he needs Twitter and Facebook to get his message across. He’s the president. All the television networks (save NBC) carried Trump’s Mussolini-esque 2 am November 4 declaration that he won, well before the votes were tallied. It was an outright falsehood, but obviously so, as the news anchors pointed out.

The fact is that none of this was ever planned for. Facebook started, as everyone knows, as a way for college kids to network with each other. Jack Dorsey originally thought of Twitter as a kind of personal walkie-talkie to let your friends know what you were up to in a given moment. It was the ambitious founders, the dynamics of Silicon Valley growth, and the unique power of the internet itself that changed I’m in a relationship and Eating a cheese sandwich into I hereby claim Michigan.

This speech problem will persist because Facebook and Twitter want it both ways—to become ubiquitous sources of both personal and global news and to keep harmful content off the platform. But when our leaders spew hate speech and misinformation on voting and viruses, that’s both newsworthy and toxic. Warning labels don’t negate the destructiveness.

The problem might be less vexing with a president who doesn’t routinely post things that would get you or me tossed off the platform. But I’m at the end of the column now and still haven’t heard whether that’s going to happen. So excuse me while I look around the house for substances that come with a warning label.

I was working at Newsweek during the 2000 election, and in the aftermath became interested in voting technology. Here’s part of a story I wrote in March 2004, about attempts to improve it. We still aren’t where we want to be on this issue, but at least in 2020, the story isn’t about voting machine breakdowns or hanging chads:

The Florida election debacle in 2000 brought us face to face with some bad news: Common voting technology can be untrustworthy. Many state and local election officials were already moving toward what they thought was the answer: Sleek electronic touch-screen voting terminals where confusion would be eliminated by confusion-free ATM-like technology. Congress sped up the process by passing the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which partly pays for the machines. Now the devices, made by major election suppliers like Diebold and Sequoia, are in 30 states (the only way to vote in Georgia and Maryland), and will be used by about 28 percent of the country in the November elections. But in recent months, computer scientists and security experts have uncovered weaknesses in these gizmos. Many now claim that it's entirely possible to hack an election—deleting electronic votes as if they were misspellings in a word processor, or doing a cut-and-paste from one candidate to another—without anyone knowing it. That's because there's no way to ensure that the choices punched on the screen will actually be reflected in the final tally. Many experts are concluding that touch screens, the alleged voting technology of the future, are ... untrustworthy.

Rachel asks, “We heard a lot about 3D printing almost as a novelty when it first became available for guys in their basements to print drones and other toys, but where is it most commonly being used today? Is it a go-to for high-tech products like medical equipment or more for low-stakes, mass-produced outputs? What's the future of 3D printing?”

Hi, Rachel. You’re right that at one point, 3D printing was promoted as a revolution where one day, devices that turned goo into actual stuff would be as common as toasters. Just like the evolution of personal computers, what early hobbyists tinkered with would eventually be ubiquitous. WIRED said so! But a few years later, Backchannel published a story called “The 3D Printing Revolution that Wasn’t.” (Now available in the WIRED archive.) For a variety of reasons, we aren’t printing our bottle caps or Christmas ornaments at home. But the original story wasn’t totally wrong when it called 3D printing the future of manufacturing. While we weren’t looking, industry embraced the technology in all sorts of ways for things, like replacement parts for machines or movie props. Meanwhile, the dream lives, and futurists talk about how one day, we will wake up in the morning and print 3D clothes. But for now, we commonly get the benefit without the hype. I recently needed to replace a tooth crown and my dentist scanned my jaw and sent the file to a lab, which used software to 3D print what’s now in my mouth. Don’t try this at home!

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

Trump “spiritual adviser” Paula White, um, spiritedly invokes angels coming from South America and Africa to secure an electoral college victory. I see a future for her as a Peloton trainer.

Here’s some election results we did get—more states legalizing weed and one even blessing shrooms. Can’t wait for the next episode of Portlandia.

Haunting story of a nameless hiker found dead in his tent. He went by the name of Mostly Harmless.

Your new iPhone is not the future of 5G. This is.

Finally, at the end of this stressful week, I bring you the story of Radish, the one-eyed, dentally challenged, 12-year-old pandemic chihuahua.

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