President Donald Trump said Thursday that he would delete his Twitter account “in a heartbeat” if it weren’t for alleged misinformation in the media. He said it’s important that he be able to quickly refute “fake news.”
“Mr. President, given your concern with Twitter, have you given any consideration to deleting your account, to just walking away from this platform you’ve been so critical of?” a reporter asked the president. (RELATED: Kayleigh McEnany Calls Out Twitter For Not Fact Checking Chinese Propaganda)
“If you weren’t fake, I would not even think about, I would do that in a heartbeat,” Trump responded. “The news is fake.”
An unidentified reporter can be heard responding: “I am real, sir.”
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“You have some great journalists, you have some journalists I have great respect for, but largely I find, at least in a political sense, there’s so much fake news, it’s disgraceful,” Trump continued.
“If we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat,” Trump said. “There’s nothing I’d rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account, but I’m able to get to, I guess, 186 million people, when you add up all the different accounts, and add Facebook and Instagram. It’s a lot of people, and that’s more than the media companies have, frankly, by a lot.”
The president signed an executive order Thursday which reportedly calls for social media companies to lose their federal protections if they engage in censorship or political discrimination.
Trump accused Twitter of anti-conservative censorship Wednesday after the social media company added a fact-checking label to some of his tweets.
Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020