You gotta give it to 2020: every day, things just get wilder and wilder. As if things weren't crazy enough, now we have people trying to assert that facts are censorship.
Yes, you read that right: in the wake of Twitter fact-checking one of President Trump's lie-filled tweets, one of the Winklevoss twins, who were among the original founders of Facebook, has called fact-checking "censorship."
And the internet isn't having it.
As you've probably heard, a furor arose a few days ago when the President openly lied in a tweet about mail-in voting, and Twitter applied a fact-checking link that led to sources of information on the topic, such as this CNN story about the exceeding rarity of mail-in voting fraud.
In any case, the President had a meltdown about it, as he is wont to do. Now, one of the Winklevoss twins, who are best-known as the guys who sued Mark Zuckerberg over their part in the creation of Facebook, is joining the fray.
Cameron Winklevoss would like you to know that facts are "censorship."
The thing is, that's not a fact. Because fact-checking is...well, verifying facts, and editorializing is the giving of opinions. They are very distinctly not the same thing.
The tweet comes on the heels of Trump's executive order attempting to overturn Section 230 of the First Amendment, which would open social media platforms like Twitter to lawsuits. The order also calls for the formation of a work-group to compile watch-lists of social media users based on their activity. You know, basic dictator stuff.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter folks were not having it, and quickly fact-checked Winklevoss's little "fact-check" about fact-checking.
Even the shadiest queens on the internet, the literal Dictionary, got into the fray with a simple, straight-forward fact-check.
For its part, Twitter itself is not backing down from its new procedure. Just hours after his executive order was signed, Trump openly called for state violence against the protestors in Minneapolis, tweeting, "...when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
Twitter immediately applied a warning message on the tweet, stating that the President had violated Twitter's terms of service.
