President Donald Trump threatens social media platform twitter with shut down after Twitter moved a day earlier to add fact checks to two of his tweets.
President Trump can not regulate or close the companies unilaterally which would require action from Congress or the Federal Communications Commission. But that didn’t stop Trump from giving out a strong warning angrily.
Claiming tech giants “silence conservative voices,” Trump sent a tweet saying, “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”
And he repeated his unsubstantiated claim — which sparked his latest showdown with Silicon Valley — that expanding mail-in voting “would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots.”
Trump and his campaign furiously lashed out Tuesday after Twitter applied a warning phrase to two Trump tweets, which called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and speculated, among other things, that “mailboxes will be stolen.” Under the messages, a link reads “Get the truth about mail-in ballots” that guides users to a “moments” page on Twitter with fact checks and news stories about Trump’s statements
Trump replied on Twitter, accusing the platform of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and insisting that “as president, I will not allow this to happen.” His 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said Twitter’s “clear political bias” had led the campaign to pull “all our advertising from Twitter months ago.” Twitter has banned all political advertising since last November.
Trump did not explain his threat and the call to demand for legislation to expand regulation seemed to fly in the face of long-held conservative principles.
Yet some Trump supporters, who have claimed bias on the part of tech firms, have challenged whether sites such as Twitter and Facebook will continue to enjoy liability protections as “sites” under federal law — or be viewed more like publishers, who may face litigation over content
For more than two decades, the protections have been credited with allowing unfettered Internet growth, but now some Trump supporters are urging further oversight of social media companies.
“Big tech gets a huge handout from the federal government,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley told Fox News. “They get this special immunity, this special immunity from suits and from liability that’s worth billions of dollars to them every year. Why are they getting subsidized by federal taxpayers to censor conservatives, to censor people critical of China.”’