House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) released a statement on Thursday blasting Donald Trump’s executive order regulating social media so he can continue spreading falsehoods.
“Allowing the proliferation of disinformation is extremely dangerous, particularly as our nation faces the deadliest pandemic in history. Clearly and sadly, the President’s Executive Order is a desperate distraction from his failure to provide a national testing strategy to defeat COVID-19,” she charged.
“The President’s Executive Order does nothing to address big Internet companies’ complete failure to fight the spread of disinformation. 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,” she explained.
She then went on to compare and contrast the approaches of Facebook and Twitter.
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“Again and again, social media platforms have sold out the public interest to pad their corporate profits. Their business model is to make money at the expense of the truth. Recently, rather than removing lucrative campaign ads, which contain debunked falsehoods, Facebook changed its rules to ensure that it can continue to allow and profit off these lies,” Pelosi noted. “While Twitter’s decision to put up fact checks of the President is an important first step to protecting the integrity of our elections, much more must be done to ensure that fact-checks are applied fairly and across all platforms.”
Pelosi shared similar remarks on her Twitter:
Allowing the spread of disinformation is extremely dangerous. Yet still, the President encourages Facebook & others to continue to exploit and profit off falsehoods – while directing the federal government to dismantle efforts to help users distinguish fact from fiction.
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) May 28, 2020
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