TRUMP'S TWITTER TAKEDOWN REVEALS ANOTHER TECH BLIND SPOT

TWITTER

IT ONLY TOOK one click.

And then, for 11 startling minutes—or blissful ones, depending on your politics—the constant drumbeat that is the @realdonaldtrump Twitter handle was muted, taken offline Thursday evening by a Twitter customer-service worker on his or her last day.

The President, for one, seems to have taken the bold move as a compliment.

But for Twitter, the worker’s final act couldn’t come at a worse time. It exposed yet another gaping security flaw for the social platforms that now find themselves at the center of international politics. Twitter has become the leader of the free world’s preferred communication channel, and yet, customer-service agents within the company have the power to shut him up. Having such a massive blind spot exposed would be wounding for Twitter no matter when it was revealed, but the timing of this epic exit was particularly apt. This week, three congressional committees grilled Twitter, Facebook, and Google about the role their platforms played in enabling Russian propaganda to spread during the 2016 election. Lawmakers reprimanded the tech titans for their lack of foresight and urged them to think through the tremendous and unprecedented power they now hold.

Thursday’s silencing of @realdonaldtrump encapsulates the central tension of this week’s hearings, a tension that applies to all three companies: While human oversight is often held up as the solution to algorithms run amok, giving people the power to judge what can be said and who can say it can be just as fraught.

Last year, for example, critics assailed Facebook after reports that the human moderators of its Trending Topics section, which highlights trending news, were biased against conservative news outlets. Facebook got rid of the human moderators, but that posed its own problems, allowing fake news stories to automatically populate that section.