Twitter’s fight with Trump is likely to be a long one – not just because the president likes to hold a grudge

The US president has been tweeting and saying things that are untrue, offensive and threatening on social media platforms for years. Why do something about it now?

It’s difficult to tell what it was that finally pushed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the line, but the battle he’s started with tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump is unlikely to be over quickly.

The first shots fired on Thursday – two fact-checking flags appended to misleading tweets by Trump about voting by mail – had already caused a stir among web-watchers and prompted Trump to threaten action. He quickly announced he would seek an executive order to change the legislation that has traditionally protected online platforms in the US from the consequences of what their users post.

For a man used to getting his way after issuing threats, Trump can’t have been exactly delighted when early on Friday another of his tweets had picked up a subtle grey label, this time covering up a post about the Minneapolis protests because it had violated Twitter’s rules on glorifying violence.

The tweet didn’t just criticise the protests, sparked by the death of unarmed black man George Floyd while being restrained by police, but included the line “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. That the label also hid the tweet from people’s timelines unless they clicked on it, and prevented it from being retweeted or liked, must have hit the former reality TV star all the harder. An attempt to repeat it through the official White House Twitter account got the same treatment.

There is little question that Trump’s tweets about mail-in-voting, which alleged that it would lead to the election being rigged, were misleading and violated Twitter’s rules on misinformation about elections. It’s also not hard to argue that his Minneapolis tweet seemed unduly enthusiastic about the prospect of violence, even if Trump later, as is his way, insisted that he had been misunderstood and the last thing he wanted was looters being shot.

Whether or not he knew he was quoting a notorious Miami police chief known for brutal crackdowns in black areas of the city in 1960, no reasonable person would interpret the tweet as anything but inflammatory.

But Trump has been tweeting, Facebooking and saying things that are untrue, offensive and threatening on these platforms for years. Why do something about it now?

It’s difficult to separate Twitter’s action from the more aggressive approach taken by social media companies towards misinformation about the coronavirus. There has been a sense that the scale of misleading and potentially dangerous content about the pandemic made inaction unacceptable. From burned out 5G masts to anti-vaxxers claiming that Bill Gates wants to microchip us all, it was not hard to see the real-world implications mounting.

The pandemic also presents what looks like a less thorny problem for intervention than politics. After all, it’s all about science, right? Of course, it hasn’t turned out that way, with Trump one of many pushing spurious claims and misinformation for his own gain. It’s in this new world of more proactive content moderation that Twitter finally decided to apply its policies to its most influential spreader of misinformation.

Twitter’s far bigger competitor Facebook has not taken similar action. Boss Mark Zuckerberg has even appeared on Trump’s favourite TV channel Fox News to proclaim that Facebook would not be “the arbiter of truth”. This despite the fact his social network has been applying fact checks and removing content before and during the pandemic.

Whatever Twitter’s fellow social media firms do, the fight with Trump will likely be a long one. And that’s not just because of the president’s ability to hold a grudge.

Any intervention to remove misleading, offensive or damaging content opens up a whole bag of questions about what those terms actually mean. Trump’s definition of all three is clearly not in tune with many of the rest of us.

Applying its rules to the most powerful man on Earth is going to cause Twitter a lot of trouble. But at least it will go some way towards forcing us to have the difficult conversations that many tech companies and politicians have been avoiding.