Tipsheet

Top Democrat's Tweet About the First Amendment Slapped With a Misinformation Warning

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  November 03, 2022 10:15 AM

The context notice has been out in full forces on Twitter lately, where users can add that to tweets where they find it useful. As Katie highlighted on Wednesday, it was a busy day for the White House, which ended up deleting a tweet on social security after being hit with such a context button. A top Democrat also experienced as much, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL). 

The tweet in question, which is still up but appears to no longer have the context added to it, came from Durbin's official account. It also received quite the ratio, with over 6,700 replies as of Thursday morning and of the 2,725 retweets, 1,460 are quoted retweets mocking Durbin's take as well. 

Bad Legal Takes also weighed in on Twitter to highlight how bad a take it indeed was, and it appears to be a particularly popular tweet. 

A lawyer who went to Georgetown University, Durbin absolutely should know better. He's also a partisan Democrat, though. 

The context, which pointed out "Misleading information to downplay political speech is protected speech," included a link to a Wikipedia page on "United States free speech exceptions." The page mentions in part:

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Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech.

The tweet above the particularly problematic one isn't much better, as it blames Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter for producing "an uptick in hate speech" and points out that "Musk himself used the platform and his influence to spread a baseless conspiracy theory about a violent attack on an elected official's family member."

Musk deleted the tweet in question which had been in response to Hillary Clinton, about last week's attack. The tweet came on Sunday and was deleted not long after, before Durbin tweeted out such a take.

Speaking of the White House having to delete the tweet, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was confronted about it during Wednesday's press briefing, as to why it was removed. "Was it removed because of the addition of a note, or was it removed because of the concern about the veracity of the message in the tweet," the reporter asked.

Jean-Pierre emphasized throughout her response that "the tweet was not complete," and added "usually, when we put out a tweet, we post it with context, and it did not have that context." Context often does not make this White House's tweets much better, though. 

She went on to rant about "MAGA Republicans" when it comes to "their continued threat to threaten Social Security and Medicare," which includes "proposing to put them on the chopping block."

The claim that Republicans want to get rid of Social Security has been fact-checked by multiple outlets, and found to be false. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler in late September gave such a claim, coming from a September 25 tweet from Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), "Four Pinocchios," indicating "Whoppers" of false information. 

Later in the press briefing, Jean-Pierre took another question when it comes to "disinformation" that the administration feels so compelled to report, even when it has to delete its own tweets because they are "not complete."

"The administration — the Biden administration remains fully committed to our mission to protect the security and resilience of our — of our, you know, elections and safeguard election infrastructure.  That includes combat — combating disinformation.  That is something that we are committed to," Jean-Pierre said, also claiming that such disinformation they are worried about comes from "foreign adversaries."