Why Twitter’s fact-check warnings don’t go far enough

Stephen H. Provost is the author of Jesus, You’re Fired!, which examines the reasons behind evangelical Christians’ support of Donald Trump.

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As spin has evolved into blatant falsehood, journalists have been faced with a difficult choice between accuracy and balance.

The problem is simple: If one side’s lying so often that you’re repeatedly calling them out on it, you can appear to be biased against them. In fact, you’re biased against falsehood. But in an effort to seem fair, it’s tempting to let them air more of their falsehoods... which, of course, means you’ll feel obligated to debunk them. It’s a vicious circle.

The simplest, and most honorable remedy would be to place accuracy ahead of attempts to achieve so-called balance, but in doing so, a news source may risk losing viewers or readers. This is becoming less of a concern every day among cable networks, where CNN and MSNBC aren’t going to get many people to come over from Fox News by being balanced.

To the far right, balanced news coverage seems biased against them, and to some extent, the same is true for the far left. Everyone’s gone to their preferred corners and is basically holed up there.

The same, however, can’t be said for the internet. Despite a minor exodus to Parler, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram remain the go-to sites for social media posts on both sides of the ideological gulf. So they’re trying to avoid offending either side — which, of course, is next to impossible when the sides are so far apart... and often flatly contradicting each other.

Disputed? Is that all?

Twitter has taken to slapping the following fact-check note on false claims by Donald Trump: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”

But the word “disputed” is about as tame as you can get. It makes it sound as though Trump’s saying one thing, and someone else is disputing it. Who? We don’t know. It could be anyone. The fact is, it’s not just disputed but flat-out contradicted by Trump’s (now-departed) attorney general, his (now-fired) cyber security chief at the Department of Homeland Security, a host of state elections officials, governors, and judges.

The least Twitter could do would be to tell us who’s disputing it: “This claim about election fraud is disputed by U.S. elections officials.” Better still, ditch the word “disputed” altogether. Why not try one of the following?

• This claim about election fraud is unsubstantiated.

• This claim about election fraud is unsupported.

• This claim about election fraud has been refuted.

Now, I don’t expect Twitter to come out and say, “This claim about election fraud is total B.S.” — even though it is. But to simply say it’s “disputed” says virtually nothing. Anyone can dispute anything without proof or expertise, just as anyone can assert anything without proof or expertise — which is exactly what Trump is doing.

Twitter’s “disputed” language doesn’t call out falsehood, it actually levels the playing field between truth and falsehood. Its judgment is no judgment at all.

If you see someone drowning, you shout to the lifeguard, “Hey, there’s someone DROWNING out there!” You don’t walk up casually and whisper in the guy’s ear: “Psst. There might be something going on out there. Take a look and tell me what you see.”

If you see a house on fire, you don’t pass a note under the door of the burning structure with a suggestion that someone inside call the fire department.

This is what Twitter’s doing. No, it’s not good enough.

Our friggin’ house is burning down.