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Tom Coates @tomcoates
, 38 tweets, 8 min read Read on Twitter
Earlier today, @realdonaldtrump unblocked my twitter account. I thought I should probably talk about this in a little more detail.
Around the end of 2016, I started writing fact-checking responses to Trump’s twitter account. With a few exceptions (mostly frustration based) I tried to keep things to the facts. It is not hard to refute most of his statements.
Much to my surprise, I found that these tweets got a lot of traction. Some of them ended up being seen over a million times. Some of this was probably because they were useful. More is because as a verified user my comments were ranked fairly highly.
I wasn’t the only person to notice this. A whole bunch of other people were doing it too and seeing the same effects. People used this in a lot of different ways, to make jokes, to post insults or memes, but many others were doing what I did - just fact-checking/contextualizing.
What I think we recognized was that Trump was using his twitter feed to, bluntly, lie in public. And all the critiques and fact-checking that the mainstream press were doing was happening elsewhere - on their websites, in newspapers, on TV.
But millions upon millions of people were seeing his tweets and his statements without any context. They didn’t see the clear articles and the basic, verifiable facts that demonstrated he was just, again, lying.
I tried to persuade my friends in the media to move their fact-checking *into* his replies, where the people who needed to see them could see them. But I could not persuade any of them to do so.
And so a whole bunch of normal people like me (and many others, some considerably better at it than me) decided to take up the slack. Contrary to expectation, this didn’t end up being a cat fight between attention-seekers, everyone just wanted clear, prominent rebuttals in public
I should be clear about the effects of this. Writing a rebuttal on Trump’s feed resulted in a fair amount of positive attention, but it also came with a massive amount of negative crap.
I’d have two days of people yelling at me on Twitter for posting GDP, employment and unemployment figures for the last ten years (showing that Trumps’ economic miracle was just a continuing line from Obama’s recovery).
The goal, always was to get the critics to shut up. So I’ve had threats of violence as a result of it (none of which I took seriously) and someone even found my home phone number and yelled abuse down it. I asked them if they were done when they paused and they hung up.
I just mention this because it was actually pretty stressful and unpleasant. Pretty much all of us were getting this stuff but on the whole we kept at it because it legitimately felt important as a way of getting the truth in front of millions of people.
Here’s the inevitable question I get asked: Do you think you actually persuaded anyone? Honest answer, it depends what you mean. I certainly never convinced a die-hard trump supporter. That much is clear.
But I think we made it harder for Trump to persuade some people who took what he said in face value and didn’t check. I think we gave support to people who were suspicious of his statements but didn’t know how to check them.
And I think we provided evidence that people who didn’t trust or like him could use in their own arguments with friends or family or the people in their lives. And, again, we put out facts. And I will go to my grave thinking that’s important.
Anyway, around last June, Trump’s team started blocking people. And very rapidly most of Trump’s twitter critics were gone, leaving his feed a wasteland of fact-free adulation from Trump’s supporters and Trump himself able to write anything he liked without contextual challenge.
Some of the prominent people who were blocked got together with @knightcolumbia to challenge this action. You can read all about it here: knightcolumbia.org/content/knight…
The rationale was actually really interesting and convincing. Government employees are subject to the first amendment. If they hold a forum for the public they are not allowed to exclude people on the basis of their viewpoints.
This is as true in a church or a rented hall as it is on Twitter. And there is some precedent here. Politicians have attempted to block their constituents on Facebook and been stopped from doing so by the courts: fortune.com/2017/07/30/pol…
I really wanted to be part of that legal action but for various reasons, including my citizenship status and that I was trying to sell my company at the time, it didn’t seem like a practical or sensible thing to do. But that’s a story for another time.
Anyway, the court ruled that Trump blocking his twitter critics was unconstitutional, because his account was de facto in an official capacity and his Twitter feed constituted a public forum: knightcolumbia.org/news/federal-c…
They did not impose sanctions, but made it clear that blocking users was unconstitutional and the White House should not do it.
You would think that this would mean that critics would be unblocked, but in fact, no. What it meant was that the White House unblocked the original plaintiffs (about eight people I think) and *no one else*. Many dozens, maybe hundreds of people were left blocked.
At this time, the Department of Justice also filed an appeal, arguing again that Trump’s twitter account was a personal, non-governmental account. knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/…
I want to really draw your attention to this. The argument is that @realdonaldtrump is not a governmental account, and yet the legal action arguing this is paid for and run by the *Department of Justice* on behalf of the *Office of the Presidency*. Just think about that!
Noticing that they hadn’t unblocked people, Knight Columbia put out a call for anyone who was prepared to have their name and twitter account sent to the Department of Justice as part of a formal request to be unblocked. knightcolumbia.org/news/knight-in…
Again, note, the court ruled that blocking was *unconstitutional* and yet the White House has left these blocks standing for *months*.
With some nervousness I put my name on that list, and here I am a few weeks later, finally unblocked.
BUT LET’S BE CLEAR, we believe *only the people in the original brief or on that explicit list* have been unblocked, and this is MONTHS after the blocks were ruled unconstitutional. Loads of people like @MollyJongFast are still waiting!
And the Trump administration is wasting millions of dollars attempting to appeal this ruling! This could drag on indefinitely and the decision could still be reversed by - of all things - the Supreme Court!
And it remains insane - this ruling is not partisan. It will hold future Democrats to exactly the same rules as contemporary Republicans. It is just a *good thing* for our politicians to not be able to blot out the views of people who disagree with them.
This whole fight may seem trivial but as more and more of our civic life moves online, as we conduct ever more of our lives in these spaces, this stuff will increasingly come to *really matter*, and this is where we’re setting the rules for the next few decades of our democracies
As to me and what I’ll be doing now, I wish I could say that I’m preparing to jump into the fray again and regularly fact-check Mr Trump (and to get all the crap that comes as a result) but honestly, I’m not sure. I have no doubt I’ll do it occasionally, but I am tired.
So instead I want to encourage you guys to do it - particularly if you’re verified because, for good or ill, our voices carry further.
When you see a tweet that he’s posted, go and do a *very* quick check that what he’s saying is true. And if it isn’t, say so. Go into his replies and post a rebuttal. Be polite, be factual, show him up for the liar that he is.
You’ll get some crap for it, you may have to turn off your notifications. The block button is your friend (I’m up to 6500 people blocked) and if you want a good rule of thumb, if they open with an insult or quote tweet you with an insult, block them out of hand. It’s not worth it
And know that even if you don’t convince anyone, you’re still standing up for evidence, for facts, for a higher standard of politics. And that matters. They can’t block you any more.
[Massive thread ends. Thanks to you all for being so patient with it.]
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