morning walk at Dallas USA today(2) 
Donald Trump was back on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, last night for the first time since he got the boot in 2021 following the riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Trump posted the mug shot of him that was taken at Atlanta’s jail this week when he was booked on the charges laid out in his Georgia indictment, which stem from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in that state. He included a caption that described the indictment as “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and urged his followers to “NEVER SURRENDER!”
After taking over the platform that was then known as Twitter last year, Elon Musk, an avowed “free speech absolutist,” reinstated Trump’s account. But this is the first time that Trump, who started a competing platform that is still known as Truth Social, has made use of Musk’s permission. The Washington Post, in a news story published this morning, portrays Musk’s decision and the attitude underlying it as part of a worrisome trend that threatens “democracy” by allowing “political misinformation” to proliferate on social media. The piece nicely illustrates the confusion, obfuscation, and hypocrisy that characterize mainstream press coverage of that subject.
As is typical of this journalistic genre, Post reporters Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison never address the question of what counts as “misinformation,” a highly contested category. Nor do they grapple with the content moderation problem of how to deal with politicians who say things of public interest that are arguably or demonstrably untrue. And although they allude to a constitutional challenge provoked by the federal government’s efforts to restrict speech on social media platforms, they never mention the First Amendment or the rights that it protects. That is a pretty striking omission by people whose profession relies on those protections and who claim to be worried about the health of our democracy.
Nix and Ellison warn that “social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods in a trend expected to profoundly affect the 2024 presidential election.” Under Musk’s baneful influence, they complain, Facebook and YouTube have “backed away from policing misleading claims” and “are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories.”
The main conspiracy theory that Nix and Ellison have in mind, of course, is the one claiming that systematic fraud, including deliberately corrupted voting machines and massive numbers of phony ballots, deprived Trump of his rightful victory in the 2020 election. As they note, neither Trump nor his lawyers ever produced any credible evidence to support that theory. Yet Trump, who currently is by far the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, still claims he actually won reelection, and the sincerity of that belief is a central issue in both the Georgia case and his federal prosecution for conspiring to make that fantasy a reality. As Nix and Ellison note, most Republican voters — 63 percent, according to a CNN poll conducted in May — agree with Trump that Joe Biden “did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.”
As Nix and Ellison see it, none of those people should be allowed to express that view on social media. They also think it was clearly wrong for X to let Tucker Carlson post his recent interview with Trump, which was timed to coincide with the Republican presidential debate he skipped. “Trump capitalized on [Musk’s] relaxed standards” in that interview, they complain, by reiterating his “false claims that the 2020 election was ‘rigged’ and that the Democrats had ‘cheated’ to elect Biden.”
For me, that unilluminating, sycophantic interview, during which Carlson never asked a challenging question and let Trump ramble on about whatever random subjects flitted through his mind, was hard to watch. But as I write, it has racked up more than 256 million views, which suggests that more than a few people were interested in what Trump had to say. By comparison, Fox News says fewer than 13 million people watched its broadcast of the debate that Trump skipped.
X, in short, seems to be giving people what they want, which makes good business sense. One might also argue, as Carlson did, that “whatever you think of Trump…voters have an interest in hearing what he thinks,” since he is the “indisputable, far-and-away front-runner in the Republican race.”
The Pulse of Washington D.C.
