EXECUTIVE ORDER/SOCIAL MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TWITTER: “A small handful of powerful social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States… They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences…
The choices that Twitter makes when it chooses to suppress, edit, blacklist, shadow, ban are editorial decisions, pure and simple. They’re editorial decisions. In those moments, Twitter ceases to be a neutral public platform, and they become an editor with a viewpoint. And I think we can say that about others also, whether you’re looking at Google, whether you’re looking at Facebook and perhaps others…
This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. Social media companies have vastly more power and more reach than any phone company in the United States. More reach, actually, than your newspapers, by far.”
-Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump Announcing an Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship,” whitehouse.gov, May 28, 2020