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Tweather is something like Donald Trump’s virtual study. The US President has now realized that he does not own this study at all, but that he can only use it free of charge. For the mutual benefit of tenants and landlords. So far. Because now Twitter has trumped Trump, also of course only purely virtual.

The short message service, about which Trump has more than 80 million subscribers, put a small text with an exclamation point in front of a tweet from the president, translated: “Get the facts about postal voting.” In the tweet, Trump had said: “It is impossible that postal elections are not substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes are robbed, the electoral forms are forged and even illegally printed and signed with fraudulent intentions. ”

The blue text leads via a link to a page in which Twitter informs users that Trump’s accusation is “unsubstantiated”, that is, it has not been proven and is even unfounded. This would have resulted in fact checks from media such as CNN and the Washington Post. These are, of course, media brands that Trump regularly calls himself a provider of false news (“fake news”); they are really hated by him.

And so it wasn’t long before Trump took on Twitter to accuse the offer of influencing the upcoming presidential election by influencing free speech (“FREE SPEECH” in capital letters), and he, the president, would not allow. In all of the US President’s Twitter escapades, this incident is among the most spectacular.

But it is not Donald Trump’s behavior that is remarkable, the man ultimately follows his daily routine of dropping stones into the digital water and looking at how wide the circles are, but the behavior of the short message service.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the platforms that contribute most to the spread of disinformation. For years, these platforms have been urged by politicians and a critical public to effectively curb hate speech and misinformation posted there for propaganda purposes.

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Facebook has always been under close scrutiny, and may have done the most, at least to give the appearance of being taken care of the virulent problem. YouTube and Twitter were far more reserved in their engagement, all three like to have statements made by their management that they want to “improve”, do something for democracy that is undisputedly attacked by the circles behind the spread of disinformation. However, the massive spread of conspiracy theories related to the corona virus shows that the providers of the platforms can do little.

Or want to do little? Because it is also clear that the currency is worth attention. The more valuable, the louder the cacophony of tones that roars against all of us online. The authority to interpret has who gets the attention. Attention is therefore, to a certain extent, the business model of the platforms, only through them can they refinance their expensive technological investments through the sale of advertising.

And if you then cut off part of your reach yourself because you are actually consistently hiding or deleting incorrect information, even those that are covered by freedom of expression (quite often they are), you have to draw up a cost-benefit calculation and ask: what brings me more – letting people do it because the store is buzzing or keeping the store clean because other people like it? So far, the first has always been the variant chosen by the companies.

Did this change? When asked about this, Twitter referred to a message dated May 11, co-written by Yoel Roth, whose job is called “Head of Site Integrity”, who is responsible for integrity on Twitter. Probably not an easy job and hopefully not just a fig leaf, in any case you can imagine the man as a kind of digital Sisyphus.

In response to the spread of the corona virus and the associated false information, the decision was made to introduce warnings under critical tweets in order to create more context. A team uses “internal systems” to identify such tweets.

Elaborate algorithms are probably not needed to identify Donald Trump’s Twitter account as a potential source of statements that would need a fact check. And yet the decision to include such a warning in Trump’s tweet includes the will to conflict with the American president – and it doesn’t matter at all whether the man is deemed mentally inferior or not. The president is the president, and anyone who messes with him should be able to get by without sleep for a long time.

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There is now an idealistic and a cynical interpretation of Twitter’s decision. The idealistic view pays off the narrative that Silicon Valley wrote about itself: pretty much every project is a result of the idea of ​​making the world better. This narrative refutes itself if you look at it in more detail, but it persists just like a Trump tweet – if you want to believe it, stick to it.

The cynical interpretation is that Twitter specifically chose a tweet from the most important supplier of its own attention economy to publicly accuse it of spreading disinformation – in order to prove how serious you are with your own mission, the public discourse to shape takes.

Seen in this way, the warning would be a purely symbolic because it has no consequences, but it will bring recognition from the media, society and politics. But only when reputation is measurably worth more than mere attention can civil society report success.

Only a few hours after Trump was humiliated by Twitter, he wrote on the platform: “Republicans feel that social media completely silence conservative voices. We’ll regulate or hire them hard before we let that happen. ”Trump will fight for his study and if he just locks it up.