Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren promised Wednesday not to spread fake news online in a tweet publicizing her plan to hold big tech companies responsible for spreading misinformation.
Warren said in a plan on her website that she will push for “new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties” on companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, among others. She also said President Donald Trump employed such misinformation during the 2016 election.
The Massachusetts Democrat also made a promise. (RELATED: Elizabeth Warren Is Using Her Own Fake Facebook Ad To Try To Take The Platform Down)
“So today, I’m making a pledge: I will not knowingly use or spread disinformation to benefit my own candidacy or damage others. And I will fight disinformation aimed at my campaign, my opponents, and voters,” Warren wrote in a tweet announcing her plan.
Disinformation and online foreign interference erode our democracy, and Donald Trump has invited both. Anyone who seeks to challenge and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election must be fully prepared to take this on—and I’ve got a plan to do it. https://t.co/ZQ6B1AezBd
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 29, 2020
Warren’s pledge comes several months after she published an advertisement on Facebook that carried false information.
“Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies—explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine. This week, we decided to see just how far it goes,” she tweeted in October 2019.
She then added a screenshot of her claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Trump. The social media company is “deliberately allowing a candidate to intentionally lie to the American people” rather than actually endorsing the president, the ad noted.
Warren, a Democrat who is running for president in 2020, told her Twitter followers that the president and Facebook are brainstorming ways to thwart the will of the people. She was referring to reports showing that Trump and Zuckerberg met Sept. 20, 2019, at the Oval Office.
Warren has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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