Twitter’s decision this week to label President Trump’s tweets for the first time appeared to the world as a quick-response salvo in an escalating battle between Silicon Valley and Washington. But the tiny labels were actually two years in the making as the company grappled with a double standard for politicians.
That resulted in a fact-check label on misleading tweets about mail-in ballots, and then, on Friday, a label on a tweet about the Minnesota protests explaining that the tweet violated the company’s rules. It was the culmination of a series of quiet and incremental processes intended to dismantle a long-standing exception that the social media industry has made for the speech of politicians, say two Twitter employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern that they could be targeted by opponents of the new policies.
