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Comment by tal8d | Hacker News Reader

> ...small correction link appended (without modifying the original statement)

'A Twitter spokesman said Mr. Trump's tweets about mail-in ballots "contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context."'

That is called "editorializing", and it distinguishes a publisher from a platform. Wanna "provide additional context"? Well you better start doing it for every single user contributing to your publication, but maybe do that after you bulk up on corporate lawyers - because your curated content firehose is going to attract the litigious type.

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I can't tell whether or not you're suggesting that this would be a bad thing, but I'd be all for every verified account of an elected official to be subject to this process.

You want to go back to the network television gatekeeping model? I don't think that will go over too well, which is especially bad since they'd have to pare down the user base to a manageable size for their board of editors. The reverberations generated by that echo chamber will be amazing.

The problem with editorializing is that this would remove Twitter's liability protection as a platform. When Twitter starts editorializing, they're taking the stance of a publisher, and they become liable for everything they didn't editorialize.

The protection afforded to them right now, as a platform, means they (Twitter) cannot be sued for defamation (as an example) when they fail to moderate claiming (as an example) that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile. Editorializing would remove this protection.

Why do it for everyone? This was clearly for the benefit of correcting mis-information which was trying to influence democratic voting by a political figure trying to undermine the legal voting rights to benefit their own re-election at a mass scale. I believe that is a reasonably good thing to protect regardless of where on the political spectrum one sits (except maybe totalitarianism)..

Because you can't selectively act as a publisher when it suits you while enjoying the legal protections afforded to a platform, you have to pick one.

> This was clearly for the benefit of correcting mis-information

To be clear, they provided "additional context" to somebody's opinion - by linking to someone else's opinion. No statistics provided, no attempt at addressing the troubling events going on with NJ mail-in ballots...

> I believe that is a reasonably good thing to protect regardless of where on the political spectrum one sits

How about we stick with the law. This has been a long time coming, not just for twitter - but Google and Mastercard... the debanking has been going on for a while.

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