House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that Twitter did the right thing in fact-checking President Trump's tweets about mail-in voting. She called the online feud between the President and Twitter an "outrageous situation." However, she accused the people responsible for content control with both Twitter and Facebook of being very selective about what they choose to regulate. Pelosi said social media giants are all about making money "at the expense of the truth and the facts." Pelosi also called Trump's Twitter feud a distraction to divert attention from the administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
White Hose Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany questioned the Twitter reaction to being called out by the administration over the social media platform's employees engaging in fact checking of the President's tweets.
McEnany told Fox News that Twitter had not fact checked Chinese claims that the U.S. military brought the coronavirus to China, and yet they did fact check what she's calling a true statement from President Trump. The President is planning to sign an executive order today that addresses his social media concerns. Twitter identified tweets the President made about mail-in voting, noting there is a lack of evidence voter fraud exists on a mass level.
The fact checker in question is Yoel Roth, whose official title at Twitter is head of Site Integrity, according to a report by the Daily Mail. Yoel reportedly has a posted anti-Trump tweets critical of the President and his supporters in the past, which has lead to a question about bias on his part. Roth was reportedly suspended by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is also weighing in on the Twitter fact checking process. He doesn't think fact-checking posts is something Facebook wants to do. His company has a different policy that Twitter. Zuckerberg told "The Daily Briefing" that private companies should be the arbiters of truth of everything that people say online. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded that his company isn't acting as the "arbiter of truth" but to connect the dots of conflicting information.
Zuckerberg made his comments in an interview with Fox News.