Day: May 28, 2020

You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them. And now it’s under threat by one of its biggest beneficiaries: President Trump, who hopes to use it to fight back against the social media platforms he believes are unfairly censoring him and other conservative voices.

Section 230 says that internet platforms that host third-party content — think of tweets on Twitter, …

There is a lot going on right now, to say the least — a global pandemic, an economic recession, millions of people without jobs, riots over police murdering a black man in Minnesota. And yet, the president is in a tizzy over a label Twitter put on two of his tweets.

President Donald Trump, who has spent recent days online pushing a conspiracy theory about a former staffer of a television host he doesn’t like, has spun into a rage after Twitter for the first time added a fact-check label to two of his tweets …

Every time I call my grandmother, she asks me the same question: “When is this going to be over?”

She hasn’t left the house since the first rumblings of the coronavirus reached her in early March, and she misses shopping at the mall, playing with her bridge club, and receiving visits from her great-grandchildren. “This will be over by summer,” she says, “right?”

I hate having to break it to her. This will not be over by summer. Not by a long shot — at least not for people who are, like her, especially vulnerable to severe Covid-19.

The economy …

Many parents have one thing on their minds: Will schools be open in the fall?

States and cities across the country are eager to get restaurants and salons reopened this month, but they’re equivocal as to whether full-time public education will be ready to resume in September.

That’s a shame. The long-term prospects for the United States are more compromised by keeping children out of school for an extended period than they are by making people continue to delay getting their hair and nails done professionally.

There are no zero-risk activities people can undertake during this pandemic, no public health …

President Donald Trump has built his political brand by posting a steady stream of misleading information, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks on Twitter. Now that Twitter did something unprecedented and fact-checked two of his tweets, he’s escalating his typical behavior.

On Tuesday after Twitter called out Trump’s false statements about vote-by-mail ballots, the president fired back, tweeting that social media platforms “totally silence conservatives voices” [sic] and threatening to “strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down” altogether.