House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that President Trump’s anticipated social media executive order was useless against disinformation and a “desperate distraction” from the coronavirus crisis.
Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order with the purpose of ensuring fairness on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Mr. Trump’s focus on social media comes after Twitter labeled two of Mr. Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting with fact checks.
Mrs. Pelosi said Twitter’s decision to fact-check Mr. Trump was “an important first step” to protecting the integrity of elections but more needed to be done.
“The president’s executive order does nothing to address big internet companies’ complete failure to fight the spread of disinformation,” Mrs. Pelosi said in a statement. “Instead the president is encouraging Facebook and other social media giants to continue to exploit and profit off falsehoods with total impunity—while at the same time directing the federal government to dismantle efforts to help users distinguish fact from fiction.”
In an appearance of Fox News, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said while he did not understand the specifics of what Mr. Trump was intending to do, he thought additional government regulation to censor a platform was not the “right reflex.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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