House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Trump’s planned executive order to limit the legal protections social media companies currently enjoy under federal law “outrageous” and “silly.”
The order would make it easier for federal regulators to hold tech firms such as Twitter and Facebook legally responsible for restricting users’ speech by suspending their accounts or deleting their posts. The plan for an executive order came just days after Trump tweeted criticism about mail-in voting and a Twitter fact-check label disputing the president’s claim appeared beneath one of his tweets for the first time.
“Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 election,” Trump tweeted. “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!”
Pelosi thought Twitter did not go far enough. She referred to conspiracy-laden posts by Trump this week about the 2001 death of a staff member for then-Rep. Joe Scarborough, a Florida Republican. Scarborough has since quit the Republican Party and is an outspoken critic of Trump as a morning MSNBC television host.
“It’s outrageous, but it’s an outrageous situation. While Twitter is putting up its fact-check under what the president says about voting, they still won’t take off the misrepresentations the president is putting out there about the death of a gentleman’s wife who died, and he’s asking them to take down the president’s misrepresentations,” Pelosi told the Washington Examiner. “So yes, we’d like Twitter to put up their fact-check of the president, but it seems to be very selective.”
Pelosi has criticized Facebook since the 2016 campaign, claiming the social media platform enabled Russia to meddle in the election.
“Facebook, all of them, they’re all about making money. Their business model is to make money at the expense of the truth and the facts that they know, and they defend that,” she said. “I think that Facebook has made tens of billions of dollars during this period of time when people are so reliant on social media, and they testify they have no responsibility for the truth. The fact is they are somebody who is avoiding taxes and regulation, and that’s what they are about. … They pander to the White House.”
Pelosi was angered with Facebook in May 2019 when the social media giant would not remove an edited video of her that the president retweeted that made her look incoherent.
“When something like Facebook says, ‘I know this is false … it’s a lie — but we’re showing it anyway,’ well to me it says two things,” Pelosi said at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco at the time. “I was giving them the benefit of the doubt on Russia. … I thought it was unwittingly, but clearly, they wittingly were accomplices and enablers of false information to go across Facebook.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, however, defended Trump’s action against the social media companies, telling the Washington Examiner: “I agree with what Mark Zuckerberg said when he said that social media shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. And it’s interesting to me with Twitter, if you’re going to hire somebody to be the arbiter, you ought to at least look at what they tweet.”
