Trump threatens to SHUT DOWN social media after spat with Twitter over mail-in voting criticism

The US president has threatened to heavily regulate, or even shut down, social media platforms that “silence conservative voices” after Twitter marked his posts with a fact-check notice implying they contained misinformation.

“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservative voices,” Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “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 happen again.”

He went on to again decry voting by mail-in ballots, claiming that the measure would result in “a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of ballots” if used on a large scale.

Later on Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Trump will sign an executive order regarding social media companies "shortly."

The broadside was apparently Trump’s way to continue an ongoing feud with Twitter. The platform drew the ire of the president this week by marking some of his earlier posts about mail-in ballots with a notice suggesting that readers click and get facts about the practice.

Twitter has been adding such notices to tweets flagged as possibly containing falsities, so their appearance on Trump’s posts was cheered by many of his opponents. Critics of the president have long been pressuring his social media platform of choice to oust him for this or that transgression for years.

Their efforts were reinvigorated recently, with a hoax accusation that Trump had murdered a non-existent intern named Carolyn Gombell. It was started as part payback and part pressure campaign in response to Trump suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had played a part in the death of Lori Klausutis, who worked for him as an intern during his stint in the US Congress. After the accusation, Scarborough’s co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, said she wants to directly talk to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and have Trump banned.

Twitter’s larger crusade on misinformation has so far produced mixed results, at least as regards coronavirus conspiracy theories. Since automated labeling was launched earlier this month, it has given numerous false positives and negatives, causing some commenters to wonder if the system ultimately does more harm than good.

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