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Trump Wants To Regulate Social Media. Facebook And Twitter Want To Regulate Trump

Trump Wants To Regulate Social Media. Facebook And Twitter Want To Regulate Trump

regulate
Trump complains that conservative views are being censored online. He wants to regulate social media. Facebook and Twitter want to regulate him. President Donald Trump at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, July 24, 2018, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump and others complain that Silicon Valley tech companies unfairly censor conservative views on their digital platforms.

Trump has formally asked federal regulators to start overseeing how online platforms treat user-generated content.

The U.S. Commerce Department petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to reinterpret key elements of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives online companies broad latitude to police content on their sites and immunity from legal liability for their users’ actions, Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump issued an executive order in May, proposing limits on Section 230 after Twitter said it would apply a fact-checking notice to the president’s tweets that included unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

The order seeks to make it easier for the government to regulate and hold companies such as Twitter and Facebook accountable if they unfairly curb users’ speech by, for example, suspending their accounts or deleting their posts, WSJ reported.

Facebook and Twitter took extraordinary action last week against Trump for spreading coronavirus misinformation after his official and campaign accounts broke their rules, Washington Post reported.

Facebook removed a post of a video clip from Trump’s official account in which POTUS tells Fox News that children are “almost immune” from covid-19. Twitter made the Team Trump campaign account delete a tweet with the same video, blocking it from tweeting in the interim.

The decision represents an about-face for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has long been a proponent of free speech on his site. Under pressure in late June, Zuckerberg said Facebook will remove posts from political leaders that incite violence or attempt to suppress voting and will put labels on posts that violate its hate speech or other policies.

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On July 27, Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz filed a criminal referral against Zuckerberg for lying to Congress under oath in April 2018.

Zuckerberg repeatedly denied that Facebook engaged in bias against conservative speech, policies, or politics and also denied that Facebook censored and content supportive of Trump and other conservatives, Gaetz said in a press release.

However, in June of 2020, an investigative report by Project Veritas revealed that whistleblowers who worked as Facebook content moderators said the overwhelming majority of content filtered by Facebook’s AI program was content supportive of Trump, Republican candidates for office, or conservatism in general.