Trump targets social media companies with executive order after Twitter fact-checks his tweets

“Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election.’ However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” Twitter’s fact-checking page said, citing reporting from CNN, The Washington Post and other news outlets.

Trump said Thursday that social media companies selectively choosing who to fact-check is tantamount to “political activism, and it’s inappropriate.”

On Wednesday night, he lashed out – on Twitter – accusing the social media giant of “interfering” in the 2020 presidential election and trying to “CENSOR” him.

“If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen!” Trump tweeted Wednesday night.

The president had earlier tweeted that “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

While Section 230 has critics on both sides of the aisle, including apparent Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who has said he believes Section 230 should be “revoked, the executive order was swiftly panned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“The proliferation of disinformation is extremely dangerous, particularly as our nation faces the deadliest pandemic in history,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“Clearly and sadly, the President’s Executive Order is a desperate distraction from his failure to provide a national testing strategy to defeat COVID-19.”

Social activists condemned the order as unconstitutional. 

“Rather than threatening to shut down Twitter, it would make more sense for him to back up his position using evidence rather than acting eerily similar to his nemesis – China – by threatening to shut down anything that stands in his way,” said Ray Walsh of digital freedom site ProPrivacy.

“Much as he might wish otherwise, Donald Trump is not the president of Twitter,” said American Civil Liberties Union Senior Legislative Counsel Kate Ruane after a draft of the executive order was made public. “This order, if issued, would be a blatant and unconstitutional threat to punish social media companies that displease the president.”

Trump’s opponents have long pressured Twitter to take action against his frequent, and frequently criticized, use of the platform. Of the 18,000-plus false or misleading claims Trump has made as president, more than 3,300 were made in tweets, according to The Washington Post.

Those calls for action reached a fever pitch this week, as Trump continued making baseless suggestions that MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough might have been involved in the death in 2001 of his former staffer when he served in Congress. 

The staffer’s widower asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove Trump’s tweets on the matter. “I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” the widower wrote in a letter to Dorsey.

Twitter refused to delete Trump’s tweets about Scarborough. But Dorsey on Wednesday defended his company’s fact-checking labels, saying Twitter will “continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally.”

Before Trump’s executive order had been revealed, one of his allies in the Senate had already questioned whether Twitter had forfeited its legal protections under the Communications Decency Act. That law protects Twitter and other websites from bearing responsibility for the content posted by its users.

That senator, Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri, vowed in a tweet to “introduce legislation to end these special government giveaways.” 

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/28/trump-targets-social-media-with-executive-order-after-twitter-fact-checks-him.html