France offers Twitter a new home amid fact-checking dispute with US president

Twitter would be welcome to move to France should the social media platform face an adverse operating environment in the US, French junior digital affairs minister Cedric O said in an interview with Radio J on Sunday.

“If Twitter would consider at some point that the US circumstances would no longer allow the company to develop according to its values and to continue to expand, and if there would be too much instability for various reasons, the company would obviously be welcome in Europe, and particularly in France,” O said.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that seeks to limit liability protections for social media firms after Twitter began selective fact checks of his posts. Twitter labelled two of the president’s posts about mail-in voting “potentially misleading” and provided links to news coverage of his comments.

Trump has accused Twitter of censorship and election interference and threatened to possibly shut down the service.

France’s digital affairs minister said he has not been in touch with Twitter, though he said France would be “extremely happy” to welcome the company. But he said, “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

He extended an invitation to entrepreneurs and researchers in the US looking for a technologyand business-friendly home, touting Europe and

France as open to a “certain idea of the internet and its regulation, a more humane and fair internet”.

Reuters reported earlier that in addition to disputing misleading claims made by Trump about mail-in ballots, Twitter has added fact-checking labels to thousands of other tweets since introducing the alerts in May, mostly on coronavirus. posts

The company does not expect to need additional staff for the undertaking, Twitter spokesperson Liz Kelley said on Saturday. Nor is it partnering with independent fact-checking organisations, as Facebook and Google have, to outsource the debunking of viral posts flagged by users.

Social media platforms have been under fierce scrutiny over how they police rapidly spreading false information and other types of abusive content since Russia exploited the networks to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.

On Friday, CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged the criticism, saying he agreed fact-checking “should be open source and thus verifiable by everyone”.

In a separate tweet, Dorsey said more transparency from the company was “critical”.

Twitter telegraphed in May that its new policy of adding fact-checking labels to disputed or misleading coronavirus information would be expanded to other topics.

Twitter said the company’s trust and safety division is tasked with the “legwork” on such labels. /Bloomberg/Reuters