Rep. Waltz: Twitter should focus in China's propaganda machine, stop double standard
Congressman Michael Waltz discusses Twitter censoring Trump's tweets over mail-in voter fraud and the president's threat to shut them down over the move
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Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., on Wednesday urged big tech companies to crack down on China and other authoritarian regimes' behavior on social media, instead of focusing on policing President Trump's tweets.
“I don’t know when Twitter decided that it was the arbiter of truth in the United States but if it’s going to try to decide to be that, then it needs to focus on the propaganda machine coming out of China,” the House Armed Services Committee member told “Fox & Friends.”
For the first time, Twitter has flagged some of President Donald Trump's tweets with a fact-check warning.
TWITTER CRACKS DOWN ON MISLEADING CORONAVIRUS INFO
On Tuesday, Twitter added a warning phrase to two Trump tweets that called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and predicted that “mailboxes will be robbed,” among other things. Under the tweets, there is now a link reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” that guides users to a Twitter “moments” page with fact checks and news stories about Trump’s unsubstantiated claims.
The president responded shortly after the social media company made the move -- of course on Twitter. He accused Twitter of "interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election."
Twitter's move comes after years in which the company declined to apply its community guidelines and other rules of the road to the 45th U.S. president. It’s too soon to tell whether this action represents a turning point for Twitter in its treatment of Trump. But the warning labels suggest that the president has finally crossed a line that the company was not willing to move for him.
Waltz said that tech companies need to stop showing a double standard in terms of "trying to decide the truth and focusing on social justice in the United States, while ignoring everything that is going on with authoritarian regimes."
“We’re finding China, on the one hand, denies its own citizens -- it bans Twitter, it bans Facebook -- but it is all over those platforms internationally. Every time I tweet about China, calling them out about covering up the virus, calling them out for the repressing of millions of Muslims, its own citizens, and its maleficence around the world, there is an explosion of kind of counter-attacks.”
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Meantime, Waltz said that the Heritage Foundation found 24 cases of voter fraud, including seven involving mail-in ballots since 2015.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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