With all the talk about an executive order, the president taking on the social media companies should not come as a surprise.
Even before he even decided to run for president, Donald Trump of New York City and hotel fame had battles with the city’s newspapers.
And since he began running for President 5 years ago, he’s put the term “fake news” in common use around the world. He’s been applauded for it by his supporters and criticized for it by his detractors.
But this current haggle over his dislike of Twitter fact-checking one of his tweets may have a benefit of raising the level of an important debate that has been going on for a while now. A debate about truth and free speech.
There are many who believe almost everything they see on Facebook for instance.And there are many others who believe little of what they see on Facebook.
Words like ‘trolls’ and ‘bots’ have become part of our modern language as we watched what happened during the last presidential election and what’s still happening now.
How do we know what’s true and what is not? What is fact or fiction?
And does our constitution protect free speech to the point that anyone can say anything, anywhere, true or not, no matter what?
And how do we know who we can trust? And maybe most importantly, how dangerous is it to believe only those who agree with our point of view?
These are questions our nation’s founders were concerned about even if they could never foresee the world of today.
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