Trump Up Against Social Media As Twitter Censors His Messages
US President Donald Trump is up in arms against micro-blogging giant Twitter for “regulating” his “free speech” and is thought to be planning an executive order to put social media platforms under new regulation.
On Thursday, Twitter flagged Trump’s message as “glorifying violence”, after he warned that crowds protesting the murder of a black man George Floyd in the Midwestern State of Minnesota by a white cop will be “shot” by security agencies if they turn violent.
Trump Tweeted:
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
Twitter shadowed Trump’s post with a notice. However, it is still viewable behind the notice.
“This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible,” says the notice.
The confrontation comes just a few days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”
Mail-in ballots
On Tuesday, the social media giant applied a fact-check to two of Trump’s tweets, including one that claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud.
Trump immediately shot back, accusing the social media giant of censorship and warning that if it continued to offer addendum to his messages, he would use the power of the federal government to rein it in, or even shut it down.
For fear of the spread of coronavirus pandemic, some Americans states are mulling over the use of mail-in voting system, where voters receive ballots by post and send them back compared to electors voting in person at a polling station or electronically via an electronic voting system.
Though a majority of Americans support them as a socially distanced solution, Trump has rejected the proposal saying they are prone to electoral fraud.
Trump, 73, who is seeking re-election was set Thursday to target social media giants like Twitter, which he accuses of bias against him, with an executive order opening them to new regulation.
Leaked versions of the executive order in US media suggest that Trump will seek to remove liability protections that the social media giants enjoy over content they publish, thereby opening them to legal action and more government oversight, according to AFP.