Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his company’s crackdown on President Trump’s tweets regarding mail-in voting during testimony Wednesday to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Committee Chair Roger Wicker, Mississippi Republican, pressed Mr. Dorsey on why his platform allows foreign dictators to “post propaganda, typically without restriction” while simultaneously acting quickly against Mr. Trump’s tweets.
Mr. Wicker said Twitter took nearly two months to tag Chinese officials’ unsubstantiated claims of the U.S. military causing coronavirus, but the visibility of Mr. Trump’s tweets have been restricted far faster.
“Mr. Dorsey, how does a claim by Chinese Communists that the U.S. military is to blame for COVID remain up for two months without a fact-check and the president’s tweet about the security of mail-in ballots get labeled instantly?” Mr. Wicker asked.
“Well, first and foremost as you mentioned we did label that tweet,” Mr. Dorsey answered. “As we think about enforcement, we consider [the] severity of offline, potential offline harm and we act as quickly as we can. We have taken action against world leaders from all around the world, including the president. And we did take action on that tweet because we saw it, we saw the confusion it might encourage, and we labeled it accordingly.”
Mr. Dorsey added that the aim of his platform’s labeling tweets is to provide additional context, as opposed to limiting speech online.
“The goal of our labeling is to provide more context, to connect the dots so that people can have more information, so they can make decisions for themselves,” he said. “We’ve created these policies recently, we are enforcing them. There are certainly things that we can do much faster but generally we believe that the policy was enforced in a timely manner and in the right regard.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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