Twitter hit back Thursday evening on President Trump’s order to crack down on social-media bias, calling his executive order from earlier in the day “reactionary and politicized.”
Mr. Trump had signed an order telling federal agencies to rein in the power of such tech giants as Twitter, Facebook and Google, including by reinterpreting or changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that protects social-media companies from liability for the posting of their users.
“This EO is a reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law,” Twitter’s Global Public Policy team posted on the site.
“#Section230 protects American innovation and freedom of expression, and it’s underpinned by democratic values. Attempts to unilaterally erode it threaten the future of online speech and Internet freedoms,” Twitter claimed.
The order came in response to Twitter flagging two of Mr. Trump’s posts earlier in the week as misleading and linking to fact-checks from “experts” and Trump-hostile news outlets.
Mr. Trump and most conservatives see such tags as ideologically selective, noting that Twitter doesn’t tag fact-checks onto tweets by, among others, Chinese communist-government officials
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer noted the irony of Twitter’s statement attacking Mr. Trump’s order.
“Since this is ’disputed information’ shouldn’t it be flagged?” he wrote.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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