Listening to @NPRinskeep asking a Twitter exec if the company has the same responsibility Inskeep would, as a journalist, to correct a dangerous/racist falsehood uttered by an interviewee on air. Think about this for a second.
On air journalists are TERRIBLE at doing this consistently, with a single person they’ve prepared to interview, usually on a topic they’ve personally researched at least a little. Twitter is supposed adjudicate an open-ended array of factual claims made by millions of users?
Inskeep used the example of false and pernicious claims about “widespread” or even “genocidal” violence against white farmers in South Africa. Plenty of claims there it’s trivial to determine are false, but also easy to imagine a correction process getting hairy fast.
You’ll see, for instance, claims that white farmers in SA are murdered at higher rates than the general population. That’s probably false, but some Twitter mod is supposed to wade into a statistical debate about another country’s crime rates?
