Earlier this week Twitter users identified a woman in New York who falsely reported a threat on a 9-1-1 call. A birdwatcher had asked her to leash her dog while she walked through The Ramble – a picturesque section of Central Park. Instead she confronted him angrily then called the police to say that an “African American man” was threatening her. If Christian Cooper had not filmed and shared footage of the incident he might well have become another victim of racialized police violence. Fortunately, in this case, it was his accuser who was identified and held accountable.
A few days earlier, Minnesota police were filmed restraining George Floyd as he lay handcuffed and pinned to the ground. A police officer pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for several minutes even though the footage clearly shows him saying “I can’t breathe.” Police claims that he had resisted arrest were also contradicted by closed circuit footage. These scenes went viral and led to protests that were quickly met with a police crackdown, unlike the anti-lockdown demonstrations in the state, a few weeks earlier, by armed white men. When state prosecutors dithered over whether to charge the officers with a crime, the protests escalated and a police station was attacked and burned down.
The woman who had threatened Christian Cooper turned out to be a successful executive who had made several donations to liberal politicians. Retribution was swift: she was dismissed from her job and had to return the dog, which she had handled with great cruelty, to an animal shelter. Justice for the Minnesota police remains a work in progress, but in both cases public awareness of egregious behaviour prompted outrage, pushback and some measure of accountability.
As often happens, the question of how to weigh free speech against social media’s potential harms became more complex when president Trump joined the fray. After earlier tweets which described Floyd’s death as “shocking” Trump later referred to the protestors as “THUGS” and warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This led Twitter to flag the tweet with a note which said the message “violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”
Earlier in the week Twitter received a moving letter from Timothy Klausutis whose dead wife, Lori, is at the centre of conspiracy theories which Trump has shared with his 80 million Twitter followers. As reported by the New York Times “Ms. Klausutis died from complications of an undiagnosed heart condition that caused her to pass out and hit her head, authorities concluded.” Since then wild rumours about her death have been repeatedly spread in order to harass her boss the former Republican congressman turned liberal MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough.
As Klausutis notes in his letter: “The frequency, intensity, ugliness, and promulgation of these horrifying lies ever increases on the internet. These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage.”
Although Twitter chose not to censor Trump outright, its willingness to fact-check his many inaccurate and conspiracy-laden utterances has clearly touched a nerve. With no sense of irony, Trump continues to fulminate on the very platform that he accuses of censorship. He has also suggested that his administration may revisit the legal protections which exempt social media platforms from being treated like publishers. Regardless of how this particular threat plays out, it is troubling that the future of a digital platform that is used globally could be determined by squabbles between an US corporation and the American president.
Perhaps it is fitting, in our current circumstances, that one of the most insightful remarks on the dangers of virality should come from Emory University professor Dr. Carlos del Rio, an expert on infectious diseases. Commenting on the risks of lifting state lockdowns prematurely, he said that it would be like “having a peeing section in a swimming pool” since people are constantly crossing state lines. This, essentially, is the problem faced by social media platforms. Their agnostic stance towards content is unsustainable for the same platforms which can expose acts of racist brutality and bring bad actors to justice can also disperse mad theories and hateful messages, worldwide, with a “frequency, intensity [and] ugliness” that is unprecedented and obscene.
