X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump’s recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.
On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.
Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn’t explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.
In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a “false positive” and that it had been corrected. The company didn’t explain further.
Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.
A “false positive,” eh? Okay, sure.
How many “false positives” have there been in the other direction, labeling anti-Kamala stories as “unsafe?”
The original Engadget article which was syndicated here:
(Yahoo! News isn’t as bad with link rot as MSN is, but it’s still not great)
I’m starting to think something is wrong with Twitter
but didn’t explain why the link was flagged
Couldn’t possibly be because Twitter is basically four chan and those “free speech extremists” always mass report shit they don’t like …
I have zero idea why everybody is still using that shit
It’s not even really 4chan though. 4chan has limited moderation and allows alt-right crazies to run wild. Twitter had strict moderation which is designed to cater specifically to alt-right crazies and suppresses beliefs that go against it.
raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president
Fucking media. Two years after he gets into power I’d expect headlines like this to be the norm:
Raid on fifth Democratic Congressman calls into question the legitimacy of Trump’s new Task Force