Twitter completely stifles free speech, says Donald Trump (File)
San Francisco:
Twitter called two tweets of Donald Trump “unfounded” and accused him of making false statements on Tuesday, a first for the social network that has long resisted calls to censor the President on messages that defy the truth.
The move sparked a furious reaction from Trump, who used the platform to accuse Twitter of “interfering in the 2020 presidential election.”
“Twitter completely stifles FREE SPEECH, and I, as president, will not allow this to happen!” he tweeted.
The social media giant targeted two tweets published by the president on Tuesday, in which he claimed without proof that the postal vote would result in fraud and a “rigged election”.
Under the tweets, Twitter posted a link that said “Get the facts on the postal ballots” and led users to a notice calling the claims “baseless”, citing reports from CNN, The Washington Post and other media.
“Trump has falsely claimed that postal ballots would lead to” rigged elections “,” the notice said.
“However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that the postal ballots are linked to electoral fraud.”
Trump directed the misleading tweets on California, incorrectly claiming that anyone living in the state would receive ballots when in fact it would only be sent to registered voters, according to the notice.
The president has long used Twitter as a platform to spread abuse, conspiracy theories, false information and insults to his 80 million followers.
For years before being elected in 2016, he built his political brand by supporting the “birther” lie that Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, was not born in the United States and is therefore not eligible for the presidency.
And on Tuesday, he unleashed a storm with an assassination attempt on MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s character by spreading the baseless rumor that he murdered an assistant.
Twitter, perhaps fearing a clash with one of its most influential users, had previously resisted calls to action.
The tweets in question violated a recently expanded Twitter policy, according to the San Francisco-based company.
“By serving the public conversation, our goal is to make it easier to find credible information on Twitter and to limit the dissemination of potentially dangerous and misleading content,” said site integrity chief Yoel Roth and global director of public policy Nick Pickles during the change. has been announced.
“Vicious lie”
The Twitter decision comes as Trump, already facing economic calamity in the United States and 100,000 deaths from coronavirus and reelection polls in distress, received a storm of violent reactions after pushing the theory of the Scarborough plot.
The entirely unproven story says that Scarborough killed a woman he had an affair in 2001, while he was a member of the Republican Congress and that she was among his collaborators.
Trump pushed the story over the weekend. On Tuesday he was there again, tweeting: “The opening of a cold case against Psycho Joe Scarborough”.
“So many unanswered and obvious questions, but I will not address them now! The police will end up doing it?” he wrote.
The deceased woman, Lori Klausutis, was discovered by investigators to have died after hitting her head during a fall in the Scarborough office, triggered by an abnormal heart rhythm.
Scarborough has become a prominent media personality, highly critical of Trump, and is co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC with his wife Mika Brzezinski, whom Trump calls “low IQ Crazy Mika”.
Klausutis widower Timothy Klausutis wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, begging him to remove Trump’s “vicious lie”.
“I ask you to intervene in this case because the President of the United States took something that does not belong to him – the memory of my deceased wife and perverted it for perceived political gain,” he wrote in a letter published by the New York Times.
When asked about the letter, Trump told reporters at the White House, “I’m sure in the end they want to get to the bottom of this and this is a very serious situation.”
He added: “As you know, there is no limitation period.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday that Twitter and other social media platforms should “say it’s not true” when misleading statements are made.
Asked about the fallout from the Scarborough tweets, a Twitter spokesperson said, “We are deeply sorry for the pain these statements and the attention they bring cause for the family.”
“We have been working to extend existing product functionality and policies so that we can deal with these things more effectively in the future, and we hope these changes will be in place soon.”
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
