President Donald Trump has gained two unlikely allies in his push to remove protections for social media websites that keep them from being held liable for what users post on their platforms, the Washington Examiner reports.
Trump targeted social media protections after Twitter began placing fact-check notices and content warnings on some of his recent tweets, signing an executive order seeking to limit their protections and saying that the company showed “clear political bias” against him.
“Facebook and the FCC are helping Trump make his argument. At the moment, they’re overlapping on this,” Joshua Tucker, professor of politics and co-director of the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, told the Examiner.
Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told the Examiner that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent statement saying his company would not fact-check politicians is a sign that he is a stronger supporter of free speech than Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
"It’s Jack Dorsey’s instincts versus Mark Zuckerberg’s. Zuckerberg has, for a long time, had a stronger instinct for free speech,” Carr said. “I think Zuckerberg’s instincts have been right.”
“In the face of pressure to follow the White House's preferred speech policies, Facebook chose appeasement, and Twitter chose to fight,” added Daphne Keller, the director of Stanford University’s Program on Platform Regulation.
“Maybe Facebook thinks it has more to lose by alienating Republicans.”
Former FCC adviser Gigi Sohn, who is now a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy, told the Examiner that Facebook gets a significant amount of advertising revenue from Trump, but Twitter does not, which may be influencing these decisions.
“Facebook moderates content, but they just don’t want to do it with political content. They are an arbiter of truth when they want to be, but not when it will hurt their bottom line and their political standing,” said Sohn.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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