Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday denied claims that the social media giant censors President Trump, even though many of the tweets by the president have been labeled as potentially misleading misinformation.
“We haven’t censored the U.S. president,” Dorsey told Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who asked about suppressed Trump tweets at a hearing featuring the Big Tech CEOs and the policies governing social media platforms.
Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, accused Dorsey of censoring Trump tweets 65 times.
Most recently, Twitter labeled as “misleading,” Trump’s tweet that mail-in balloting around the country is encountering “big problems and discrepancies.”
Twitter has labeled many other tweets, including Trump’s declaration that he is immune to the coronavirus now that he has recovered from an infection.
Republicans criticized Twitter Wednesday for failing to apply labels to troubling tweets from foreign leaders, including one by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei’s tweet, “#Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened,” remains unlabeled on the social media platform.
Dorsey stuck to his argument that the labeling rule often employed for Trump’s tweets is applied to all world leaders.
“We have not censored the president. We have not taken the tweets down that you’re referencing,” Dorsey told Blackburn. “They have more context and a label applied to them. And we do the same for leaders around the world.”
Earlier Tuesday, Dorsey called Khamenei’s tweets “saber rattling” and said they were judged under a different standard than Trump’s tweets, which “can cause more immediate harm.”
