Fact checks in the fact check
The recent news that the us-american trumpeltier has signed a decree, i.e. the government's intention to develop a law that can censor and ban so-called social media, is in itself a farce, so this article contains no ingredients of a satirical nature, only facts.
'Facts' is the key word. What the social networks and services, all of which originate from the USA, have in common, apart from the 'patriot act', is their voluntary and, as it were, arbitrary nature to delete disseminated messages (videos, podcasts and posts), to block users and to change or shut down their services as they please.
The latter will probably not happen, but at the beginning of the year no one would have dared to claim that the countries of the world that call themselves democratic would deprive their citizens of their basic rights and that the people would accept this by nodding their heads (as a maximum reaction).
Advertising revenue and especially metadata (i.e. not so much the content as the behaviour and connections of users) are far too valuable for any operator to slaughter its golden calf.
What had happened?
The golden-haired king of North America had tweeted (we say 'twitter' here, in English-speaking countries it's 'tweet') that postal voting encourages electoral fraud. Whether this was an allusion to the election procedure in Poland is not known; I'm not going to research that. For the first time in the long love affair between the former billionaire heir and the short news service represented by a stylised cyan-coloured bird, the latter had subjected its report to a fact check and marked it as misleading. The majesty insult was an affront - oh sorry, I didn't want to use unrealistic, exaggerated or terms that the president of the free world doesn't know, so let's start from the beginning: labelling it as misleading was misleading and an attack on free expression. It would be manipulation of opinion to support hostile political views.
I know it is difficult to understand what is going on in the mind of this clown figure because of the absurdity in itself, but we also have to muster some understanding; conversely, how would we feel if we grew up in the land of the free and the brave (cf. Hymn) in a golden cage/skyscraper and were unwittingly able to have any fantasy about omnipotence presented to us on a silver platter?
What are the numbers on this?
Like Facebook, WasisOpp or Instant Write, Zwitscher now has over one billion users, of which about ten per cent are active, after all, meaning online, not that they also write messages, but perhaps only read them. In the land of unlimited (before the unloved son of an estate agent became president) possibilities, a quarter of the world's members are in the bird club. With its millions of followers, one can assume that apart from the worldwide press, who by profession have to watch the verbal derailments every day and then report unfairly on them, about one in twenty Republican voters also follow what strings of letters have fallen from their hero's fingers. Only a good dozen handful of others have more followers, which gives him the right to say that his remarks are above criticism.
What is the goal?
Basically, the cirus fruit pigmented head of state wants nothing more than for everyone else to be censored except him. And if Section 230 has to contain a presidential clause for this purpose, then that is the right way to go. But the Minister of Justice must be careful to recognise the difference between 'world', 'America' and 'USA', otherwise another American president might feel called upon, without mentioning Bolsonaro by name, to spread his opinion on the rainforest and the imperialism of other countries.