GUY BENSON: The ‘Fact-Checking’ Mess Twitter Has Created For Itself.
Every controversial tweet that doesn’t get flagged for review will result in eruptions of protest from partisans. If false, misleading, or problematic content from left-leaning sources are left alone, Twitter will be viewed as actively partisan by roughly half the country — perhaps inviting regulatory “oversight” from aggrieved Republicans. But if they don’t ‘fact check’ every single tweet from Trump or other prominent Republican sources, lefties will allege that Twitter is “complicit” by effectively endorsing certain tweets as either accurate or unworthy of being challenged. They’ve established a standard that will be next to impossible to fairly police and enforce. As Allahpundit writes in his excellent post on this subject, why did Twitter decide to ‘fact check’ Trump’s tweets about vote-by-mail, as opposed to his conspiratorial sludge about the death of a young woman years ago? Such questions are only the beginning of Twitter’s self-created headaches. Also, by appointing themselves arbiters of accuracy, they’ve set themselves up for charges of bias and pointed questions about credibility.
Twitter has faced charges of bias for years, and for good reason. With this new move, what they’ve done is opened entirely new outlets for their biases while increasing their own workload and maybe opening themselves up to further regulatory scrutiny.
Smart!