Newt Gingrich on fact-checking Trump’s tweets: Twitter is going down a very dangerous path
Former House speaker and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich tells ‘America’s Newsroom’ if Twitter isn’t ‘careful’ they may risk being a regulated public institution rather than the ‘totally free entrepreneur institution.’
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on “America’s Newsroom” Wednesday that he believes Twitter is going down a "dangerous path" by attaching a fact check to a tweet from President Trump.
“I think Twitter has gone down a very dangerous path and, if they’re not careful, they’re going to become a regulated public institution rather than a totally free entrepreneurial institution,” Gingrich said on Wednesday.
Gingrich made the comments shortly after President Trump warned social media giants that the federal government could “strongly regulate” or “close them down” if they continue to “silence conservative voices.”
It is unclear what authority, if any, the president was citing in his threat to close social media platforms down in a series of tweets on Wednesday, but the tweets surely were meant to escalate pressure on the platform.
Trump’s tweets on Wednesday came after Twitter slapped a warning label on one of Trump’s tweets referring to mail-in ballots for the first time Tuesday, cautioning readers that despite the president’s claims, “fact checkers” say there is “no evidence” that mail-in voting would increase fraud risks and that “experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”
“What Twitter called a fact-check was not true,” Gingrich said. “They went to left-wing publications to get a left-wing version. The president is correct, we have seen a lot of theft of vote, we have seen a lot of mail being lost. There are all sorts of challenges with going through an all-mail program for voting.”
Twitter’s new warning label was issued even though a Twitter spokesperson acknowledged to Fox News that Trump’s tweet had not broken any of the platform’s rules, and even though some other experts have raised fraud concerns surrounding mail-in voting.
A Twitter spokesperson also told Fox News that Trump's tweets "contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots," and that "this decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
“I think it has to be a great concern, certainly to any conservative, that the three key social media -- Twitter, Facebook and Google -- are all located in one of the most radical left-wing parts of America and they express that in their biases,” Gingrich said.
He added that Facebook, Google and Twitter “have a track record of becoming more and more anti-conservative.”
TWITTER EXEC OVERSEEING FACT CHECK EFFORT HAS HISTORY OF ANTI-TRUMP TWEETS
“You can’t have free speech dominated by an institution, which is determined only to allow its side to speak,” Gingrich said.
He went on to say that not just President Trump, but “anybody in America who has a traditional value or a traditional sense of patriotism or a traditional sense of American history” is “under siege in those social media groups.”
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Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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