Trump Threatens Executive Action Against Twitter After Being Fact Checked

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Trump Threatens Executive Action Against Twitter After Being Fact Checked

According to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, President Trump is set to sign an executive order “pertaining to social media” on Thursday,  She failed to offer any further details.

This announcement comes after a multiday feud between the president and Twitter.

The social media platform applied for an informational label to one of the president’s tweets on Tuesday for the time.

The warning urges users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” was attached to two of the President’s tweets in which he railed against mail-in voting in California, claiming that the practice is full of fraud without any evidence to support the claim.

“These Tweets contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” a spokesperson for Twitter told the press.

The President as well as his supporters quickly latched on to the fact check, accusing the company of bias against Right- Wing conservatives.

Trump accused the social media platform of “stifling FREE SPEECH” and then threatened to “close” it in tweets Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

He later pledged to take “Big action” against Twitter.

“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters. Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact-checkers’ is only a smokescreen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

It is not yet clear how an executive order would affect the ability of Twitter to label false or misleading content.

The legal rights of social media platforms’, as private companies to delete or otherwise regulate speech, in this case, tweets, is well established legally. 

The executive order could also be about an effort against what the President and his supporters allege is a suppression of conservative viewpoints in tech more broadly.

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