Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that “we have to get to the bottom” of the bias against conservatives on social media platforms, but did not say what he intends to do — if anything — to combat the problem.
His remarks came during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
“Something is happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it. It’s very fair. It’s collusive and very, very fair to say that we have to do something about it,” Trump said.
“It’s different than it used to be,” Trump said. “It seems to be if they’re conservative, if they’re Republicans, if they’re in a certain group there’s discrimination.”
"There is collusion with respect to that, " President Trump says, claiming that some social media outlets discriminate against conservatives.
"Something's happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter," he claims https://t.co/DfG67UF5pY pic.twitter.com/AxvQryLVuT
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 19, 2019
President Trump added that there is collusion taking place with the social media executives who hate conservatives — and “that’s really unfair.”
“We use the word collusion very loosely all the time, and I will tell you there is collusion with respect to that because something has to be going on,” Trump said. “When you get the back scene, back office statements made by executives of the various companies and you see the level of, in many cases, hatred they have for a certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election, you say that’s really unfair.”
Just this week, Twitter admitted to shadowbanning a tweet from Sean Davis, co-founder of conservative website The Federalist. The tweet in question was a screenshot of former FBI attorney Lisa Page’s Congressional testimony in which she discussed an urgency within the FBI to find evidence of someone within the Trump campaign working with the Russians to obtain damaging information about Clinton.
Along with the screenshot, Davis wrote “This particular passage from Lisa Page’s testimony about the FBI’s Trump investigation is interesting, given that we now know for a fact that a foreign national working on behalf of Hillary’s campaign was working with Russians to obtain damaging information about Trump.”
Though the tweet was entirely factual, Twitter confirmed to him that they did indeed shadowban his tweet — in order to “keep people safe[.]”
