Donald Trump doesn’t like being fact-checked, especially by his favorite social media outlets. On Tuesday, Twitter took a very small step adding an exclamation point and link to fact-check to a couple of the president’s tweets about mail-in ballots. Even though a lot of people thought Twitter didn’t go nearly far enough, it set Trump off. In a series of tweets the president blasted the company saying:
@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post…. Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!
Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!
Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
But many people think Trump got off easy from Twitter. There is a push to have the president’s tweets about former Joe Scarborough staffer Lori Klausutis taken down. Earlier this week her husband Timothy Klausutis, personally pleaded with Twitter to remove the tweets. So far Twitter has refused to do so, but according to The Washington Post:
Twitter is debating whether to take action on the Scarborough tweets, said a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Dangerous territory here; @Twitter now "fact checks" @POTUS (and presumably everyone else) but allows some of the most disgusting targeted harassing content to flourish. Why didnt @jack, just take down his moronic tweets about @JoeNBC for violating TOS? Case closed https://t.co/B0wMhI7GF4
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) May 27, 2020