Jack Dorsey is still the CEO of Twitter following a period of some uncertainty as hedge fund manager Paul Singer, whose Elliott Management fund acquired a $1 billion stake in the social media company, made moves to have the founder removed.
A joint statement Monday revealed there was no ouster, at least not yet.
Twitter’s board authorized a $2 billion share repurchase program, funded in part by a $1 billion investment from equity firm Silver Lake, a tech investing powerhouse. The share buyback is an effort to shore up stock prices; poor stock performance was among the many factors behind Singer’s plan to remove Dorsey.
Elliott and Silver Lake will both have seats on the board. Wired speculated that Dorsey’s reprieve might be temporary, considering those new board members will be tasked with evaluating the “CEO succession plan.”
It is a critical year for the social media giant, with significant events on the slate, particularly the U.S. election. Within the realm of politics, the company continues to find itself in the spotlight as well as the crosshairs.
Just weeks after instituting its new “synthetic and manipulated media” policy, Twitter applied the label for the first time to a video shared by White House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino and retweeted by President Trump.
Twitter marked that video, which featured a clip of former Vice President and Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, as “partly false” and added a warning message to the tweet that said, “Manipulated media.”
The updated policy states that a user “may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm” and that the company may “label tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide additional context.”
The video featured a clip of Biden speaking at an event in Kansas City, Missouri. The violation of Twitter’s rules is seemingly on the grounds of context, in that the clip ends before Biden completed his remarks.
It was the Democratic National Committee that flagged the video to Twitter “as part of its program to clamp down on the spread of disinformation in 2020.”
In an official response, Trump campaign Chief Operating Officer Michael Glassner sent a letter to Twitter and Dorsey, demanding the company likewise add a warning label to a video shared by the Biden campaign, which Glassner described as “doctored and deceptively edited.”
“Twitter applied its new ‘manipulated media’ label to a 100% real, 100% authentic, 100% unedited video of Joe Biden,” the letter said. “In order for American elections to remain free and fair, it is critical that the Biden campaign be held to the same standard it is demanding apply to others.”
“Therefore, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., is formally requesting that Twitter apply its new ‘manipulated media’ label to a doctored and deceptively edited video tweeted by the Biden campaign less than a week ago,” Glassner wrote.
The Biden campaign also pressed social media titan Facebook to label shares of the video there under its policies.
After Biden campaign manager Greg Schultz issued a statement accusing Facebook of “malfeasance” and “trafficking in blatantly false information,” the company initiated a “fact check” that rated the video “partly false.”
Twitter stated the company will respond to the Trump campaign’s complaint but did not elaborate.
The nature of the back-and-forth is illustrative of the complicated role that tech companies will play in the 2020 election — Twitter, because of its unique importance to both the president and the national media, particularly so.
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, said last week that lawmakers should “provide a basic regulatory framework” for social media and tech companies to deal with “blatant disinformation and hate speech that goes viral from their platforms.”
Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee’s tech task force, said that instances of taking down or labeling content as “disinformation” is not a transparent process. “Without this clarity and consistency, voters cannot trust that platforms are objectively filtering news sources and search results, absent any political agenda or censorship,” she said.
That task force, along with continuing inquiry into censorship, such as that led by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, and the Federal Trade Commission investigating aspects of social media advertising, political sponsorships, and disclosures, puts a big spotlight on the companies at the center of the information deluge this election year.
As the election season moves from the Democratic primary to the general election, and with both the DNC and the Trump campaign explicitly stating their intent to push back at disinformation, as well as any perceived favoritism or bias, it is likely the specific issue of manipulated media will face further scrutiny in future hearings, before voters go to the polls this November.
Caleb Howe is an editor at Mediaite, covering politics, policy, and the press, and a former web developer based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
