President Donald Trump threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies the day after being fact-checked by Twitter. “Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” the president wrote in a post on Wednesday. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”
The president, notes the Associated Press, does not have the power to “unilaterally regulate or close the companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission,” and Trump’s call to expand regulation on such tech giants “appeared to fly in the face of long-held conservative principles on deregulation.” But still, it’s an alarming threat coming the morning after Twitter flagged two of his tweets about mail-in voting as “potentially misleading.” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel called Trump’s threat “a red alert for all Americans who care about free speech” in a statement on Wednesday. “Not only does he not have the authority to silence these platforms and users, the constitution expressly forbids using the power of government to exact reprisals against speech. He isn’t protecting free speech; he is chilling it,” said Nossel, adding that “Twitter is not obligated to offer a vehicle for President Trump’s falsehoods, and he perverts the power of the presidency in threatening the company for doing so.”
As my colleague Alison Durkee wrote, Tuesday was the first instance of Twitter fact-checking the president’s posts on the platform, part of the company’s initiative to label tweets containing false or misleading claims. Alerting users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label links to a Twitter Moments page providing additional context on the matter, noting articles and tweets from experts that debunk Trump’s unsubstantiated statements. Trump has lied repeatedly about widespread voter fraud taking place in 2016 and has ramped up the unfounded fraud allegations ahead of November’s vote. Trump responded to the Twitter fact-checking with a slew of accusations, baselessly claiming that Twitter “is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”
Twitter’s fact-check comes as the company is under pressure to do something—which it so far hasn’t—about Trump’s deranged conspiracy tweets regarding MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. The president’s team—as well as Trump himself—have cited Twitter and Facebook as instrumental in winning the 2016 election and remain deeply focused on reaching voters through such social media platforms again in 2020. Though Trump and his allies are quick to accuse Facebook of bias, the Washington Post noted earlier this year that Republicans “have leveraged Facebook’s fears of alienating conservative Americans to win concessions” and the company’s “most widely shared news content typically includes stories from Fox News and other right-leaning sources.”
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