Twitter makes a lot of people stupid and angry, so it’s fitting that the current debate about Twitter should be so full of stupidity and anger.
First, some context. President Trump frequently tweets or retweets things that are untrue. He also tweets things that are true. One thing that makes all of this so unpleasant is that a great many of the president’s foes feel compelled to claim that the true things are false, and his fans are compelled to argue that the false stuff is, at least in some sense, true. (Another factor that makes things even more unpleasant: The president often tweets offensive things, and the same dynamic of “No, it’s not!” vs. “Yes, it is!” plays out.)
More broadly, many on the right have convinced themselves that Twitter “censors” conservatives on the platform, which they think is not only wrong but some sort of violation of the First Amendment. It’s not. Many on the left think Twitter doesn’t censor enough, specifically in the case of the president himself.
It was against this backdrop that Trump tweeted (again) that governors must not use mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The two-part tweet began, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.” He concluded by declaring, “This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.
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