Twitter and Trump: a feud years in the making finally erupts
On one side of this fraught moment: the president of the United States, facing multiple crises less than six months before the election. On the other: Twitter, the social media giant, which has grappled for years with how to handle its most prominent — and divisive — user. Caught in the middle: reality itself, and whose version gets heard over all the noise.
Twitter’s decision this week to stand up to President Donald Trump by attaching warnings to some of his many tweets has been years in the making, a culmination of American divisions playing out and being amplified across social media. It is fueled by some of the very elements that make modern American discourse so polarized, so fast-moving and — at the oddest of historical moments — so fragmented.
Twitter's assumption of a stronger referee role in its approach to Trump's tweets reflects a “pretty radical change,” said Josh Pasek, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “We really haven’t been at a place where social media companies were willing to take on this role.”
But it also heightens the dangers of polarization. “When you can’t agree on the state of the world, you open up opportunities for people to question the motives of others," Pasek said. He says that makes existing conflicts worse and de-legitimizes people with diverging views. “You make it easier to see those people who differ from you as less American."
For years, since long before he was president, Trump has used Twitter as a personal megaphone to build his personal brand, appeal to his supporters and attack his rivals of the moment. In the process, regardless of the facts at hand, he often creates his own version of reality — from birtherism to climate-change denial to exaggerations about voter fraud.
On Wednesday, Twitter...
