Trump Escalates War With Twitter After Signing Social Media Executive Order

After a long-lived feud with Twitter, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday stripping social media companies of their legal protections.

After it was urged to remove Trump’s misleading tweets, Twitter decided to flag his tweets about mail-in voting as “misleading.” One tweet in particular was also labeled with an informational link, providing non-partisan context for voters.

“These Tweets contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” a spokesperson for Twitter said.

Conservatives are accusing the social media platform to be biased against Republican views, and Trump himself has threatened to take “big action” against it.

In a series of tweets, Trump claimed that the company was “stifling free speech” and threatened to close his account.

Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, spoke out against social media’s alleged liberal biases.

“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters. Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility,” he said in a statement.

A year ago, the Trump administration drafted an executive order entitled “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship” In which it pledges to give legal immunity to platforms, claiming to protect their “free speech rights”.

It is unclear how an executive order will hinder social media from flagging potentially misleading news.

A White House spokesman declared that “left-wing bias in the tech world is a concern that definitely needs to be addressed from our vantage point, and at least exposed [so] that Americans have clear eyes about what we’re dealing with.”

Article by Antonio Clibrizzi