Can Trump shut down Twitter?

Can Trump regulate or
shut down Twitter or Facebook?

Trump threatens to shut down
Twitter for fact-checking him

But legal experts told
Business Insider the president has
“absolutely no legal authority”
to carry

President Donald Trump’s tweet
response to Twitter’s fact-checks of
some of his postings on Wednesday.

By William Goldschlag and Dan Janison
william.goldschlag@newsday.com, dan.janison@newsday.com
Updated May 28, 2020 5:39 AM

 

* President Donald Trump threatened to “strongly regulate” or entirely shut down social-media companies shortly after Twitter fact-checked two of his tweets pushing conspiracy theories about mail-in voting.

* But legal experts told Business Insider the president has “absolutely no legal authority” to carry out his threats and described Trump’s efforts as “empty virtue signaling to his base.”

* “It’s very clear that what he is really doing is trying to bully Twitter into continuing to allow him to broadcast whatever he wants to, however false it is, with complete impunity,” a Drexel University law professor told Business Insider.

President Donald Trump struck
a forceful tone this week when
he threatened to “strongly regulate”
or entirely shut down social-media companies
for what he perceived as an anti-conservative bias.

But legal experts say
he has “absolutely no legal authority”
to carry out his threats.

The president’s early-morning tantrum was catalyzed by Twitter’s decision on Tuesday to add fact-checking links to two of his tweets, in which he alleged mail-in voting in California would be “substantially fraudulent” and lead to a “Rigged Election.”
Twitter’s alert — the first of its kind on the site — linked to a “Moments” page titled “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud” that listed a series of facts contradicting his claims.

Soon after, Trump accused the social-media platform of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and said he wouldn’t allow Twitter to stifle free speech.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”
The president said his administration would take “big action” against the tech company.
Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer and criminal-defense attorney at Brown White & Osborn (and also a blogger at the popular legal site Popehat), told Business Insider that Trump’s tweets were “empty virtue signaling to his base.”

“The government has no power to close down social media, and social-media programs have both statutory and First Amendment rights to moderate and comment as they see fit,” he said.
Notably, a federal court last year found that the president violated the First Amendment by blocking Twitter users, thus depriving them of participating in a public forum.
‘This isn’t China’
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has threatened legal action against social-media companies who make decisions the president disagrees with. Last year, the White House drafted a proposal to regulate social-media platforms to confront allegations of bias against conservatives.
The proposal asked the Federal Communications Commission to create new regulations about how social-media companies are allowed to moderate speech on their platforms. It also called for the Federal Trade Commission to keep a public list of complaints from users who believe their rights have been violated by online moderation.

But Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives social-media companies broad authority to moderate speech.
And though members of Congress have threatened legislation on the issue for years, the threats seem “more like culture-war posturing than substance,” White said.
Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a law professor at Drexel University who specializes in civil liberties and cyber issues, called Trump’s threats against Twitter “totally asinine.”
“They completely lack any kind of legal foundation whatsoever, and it’s very clear that what he is really doing is trying to bully Twitter into continuing to allow him to broadcast whatever he wants to, however false it is, with complete impunity,” she told Business Insider.

From: Business Insider

 

Jack Dorsey’s response after US President Donald Trump threatened to shut down all social media.

A day after United States President Donald Trump threatened to shut down all social media platforms, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took a dig at both the President and Mark Zuckerberg as he doubled down on the platform’s stance against fake news.
Taking to Twitter, Dorsey doubled down on Twitter’s stance on fake news and said that though the platform was not an “arbiter of truth”, it would still work toward eradicating fake news by connecting “the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves”.

 

Jack Dorsey to donate $1 billion to fund COVID-19

Jack Dorsey to donate $1 billion
to fund COVID-19 relief and other charities
He’s putting $1 billion toward his Start Small fund

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of both Twitter and digital payments platform Square, said on Tuesday that he will donate $1 billion worth of equity in Square to his Start Small LLC to fund COVID-19 relief around the world. Dorsey made the announcement in a tweet, revealing that the sum equates to roughly 28 percent of his current net worth, or about $3.6 billion. The announcement marks the most significant philanthropic effort from the 43-year-old tech executive in his career.

From: The Verge

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