Trump threatens to 'strongly regulate' or shut down social media platforms

President Trump became POTUS because of the way the media treats conservatives, libertarians and Republicans. He doesn't take any guff from reporters and seems to enjoy scuffling with them. But let's not pretend he never says things on Twitter that would best be left unsaid. If you think he's never wrong to say some of those things, then there's nothing I can say that would convince you otherwise.

On Wednesday morning, Trump threatened to "strongly regulate" or actually shut down Twitter and other social media platforms after Twitter "fact-checked" him for the first time. I used scare quotes around the term because their fact-checker needs to be fact-checked as he got things terribly wrong.

There's no question in the mind of any sentient Republican that social media platforms act as publishers when it comes to their postings and basically work as Democrat shills for the left--this is obvious to anyone with more than two brain neurons to rub together.

President Trump took to Twitter to attack Twitter:

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

Trump said social media platforms are silencing “conservative voices,” a legitimate charge that has been leveled against other platforms like Facebook.

Trump later added:

“We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!”

No U.S. President has the power to unilaterally shut down a company, and that's a good thing. If it was true that a president could have this power, Obama would have probably shut down Parler in a heartbeat.

The whole thing began when the President sent out a tweet claiming that instituting a mail-in ballot system for voting in the U.S. would lead to widespread voter fraud.

Twitter attached a fact-check message to Trump’s tweet allowing users to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” The link leads to a fact-checking page that describes Trump’s mail-in voting claim as “unsubstantiated.”

But the facts about mail-in ballots isn't as clear as Twitter and others would have us believe.

An article in the National Review discusses how the wholesale use of mail ballots are not closely scrutinized. "Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud," they wrote, explaining that this was "the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker," both Democrats.

The article continues: "In 2012, a Miami–Dade County Grand Jury issued a public report recommending that Florida change its law to prohibit 'ballot harvesting' unless the ballots are 'those of the voter and members of the voter’s immediate family.' "Once that ballot is out of the hands of the elector, we have no idea what happens to it,” they pointed out. 'The possibilities are numerous and scary.'”

But while it's important to note that President Trump makes a good case for in-person voting, especially since people are able to get out of the house more, he is not correct about being able to shut down private businesses. In other words, he will need a different line of attack if he want to change the way Twitter and others operate.


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