Trump says social media platforms are 'totally discriminating' against conservatives

ByMERIDITH MCGRAW ABCNews logo
Saturday, August 18, 2018

President Trump weighed in on social media platforms' banning certain content, claiming in a series of tweets that the sites are "totally discriminating" against conservative voices supportive of his administration.

"Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won't let that happen," Trump tweeted Saturday morning from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The president's tweets come as major social media platforms have removed certain content by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Facebook said earlier this month that it removed content from some of Jones' pages for "glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies."

Spotify, Apple and YouTube have also taken down at least some content from Jones and InfoWars, and Twitter recently suspended his account temporarily.

Trump said on Twitter Saturday that "censorship is very dangerous." He also made his oft-repeated reference to news organizations -- in this case, CNN and MSNBC -- as "fake news," and suggested that there should be no controls on social media. "Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!"

Twitter took action Tuesday, suspending Jones' personal account for seven days for violating the platform's rules.

Twitter would not comment on what the offending post said. But in a video posted Wednesday to the Twitter account for Infowars, Jones said the company suspended him and may shut him down completely because he violated its rules by posting a "video I shot last night saying [President Donald] Trump should do something about the censorship of the internet."

The video is no longer available on Twitter or Periscope, where Jones posted it. But it is still up elsewhere on the web. In it, Jones says people "need to have their battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides and you got to be ready because the media is so disciplined in their deception."

Jones is currently the defendant in a lawsuit by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims over his past claims that the 2012 mass shooting in Connecticut, which killed 26 children and adults, was staged. Jones now says he believes the Sandy Hook shooting did occur, and has argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because he was acting as a journalist.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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