Sorry Trump, Twitter makes own rules

My view of the dust-up between Twitter and President Donald Trump is simple: The company should treat him exactly like it would treat any other user. But I’ll also admit to a degree of concern about how it treats other users, particularly the company’s growing determination to regulate opinions expressed on its site.
Twitter, long criticised by the left for its refusal to flag or even delete presidential tweets for which a less-known user might be suspended, finally decided to add warnings to a pair of Trump posts fulminating about the possibility of fraud when ballots go by mail. Given the president’s history of tweets that are grossly offensive, actually false or both — like last week’s despicable attacks on Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, which I won’t dignify by repeating or linking to — mail-in balloting is an odd place to draw the line. But the line’s been drawn, and the president’s response is a childish tantrum, threatening to shut Twitter down.
Twitter is a private company and it gets to set its own rules. If you break them, the company can alter the terms on which it will serve you. Yes, there are arguments for treating the president differently. For one thing, there’s a case to be made for the respect due the office, whatever one’s opinion of the occupant at a given moment. For another, Trump’s every tweet receives such a level of
media scrutiny that
flagging what Twitter considers untruths will be redundant. And given the belief by many of the president’s supporters that the news media distort his every word, social media might be his only means to stay in touch with his base.
Those arguments are not without force, but they’re not persuasive. I’d rather say that Trump used social media less, and with some semblance of dignity. If he’s going to use Twitter, however, he doesn’t get an exemption because of the office he holds.
But that’s far from the end of the matter. I worry about the rules Twitter imposes. On the one hand, I admire the company’s efforts to help users sort between bad information and good on such issues as vaccinations, and I’m intrigued by the possibility that the platform might imitate Wikipedia in having users themselves moderate content. On the other,
when it comes to arguments over policy and politics, I’d rather that no institution, public or private, set itself up as arbiter.
Twitter, for example, has lately adopted a policy of placing labels on “potentially harmful” tweets about Covid-19, including those that go against the advice of public health officials.

—Bloomberg