What Was Donald Trump’s Twitter?

Each of the big social platforms handled the challenges of the Trump presidency in its own unique way, scrambling to address or neutralize various urgent and contradictory concerns from users, advertisers, lawmakers and occasionally the president himself. But there was one idea that none of them could resist trying, no matter how little it had done for the last platform to use it: the informational label. Since 2016, users across platforms have been informed that some things they were seeing or sharing were disputed by outside fact checkers. An informational label alone — particularly one that doesn’t provide information that couldn’t easily be found elsewhere — represents a particular set of assumptions about what the problem is in the first place. It assumes that users sharing disinformation are merely mistaken; that assertions of external authority and expertise are persuasive; that a Wikipedia article is enough to transport someone from a flat earth back to the round one they chose to leave behind; or that a warning about forbidden information won’t be enticing, but discouraging. The labels did, however, provide insights into how those who run the platforms were thinking at the time. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, the platforms seemed to say, but the labels resembled just a few more additional fluorescent tubes installed in the ceiling.