Trump accuses Big Tech companies of bias against conservative platforms
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump used a White House conference Thursday to applaud farright social media provocateurs even as he conceded some of them are extreme in their views.
Trump, who has weaponized social media to eviscerate opponents and promote himself, led a “social media summit” of likeminded critics of Big Tech, excluding representatives from the platforms he exploits.
The president used the event to air grievances over his treatment by Big Tech, but also to praise some of the most caustic voices on the right, who help energize Trump’s political base.
“Some of you guys are out there,” he told them. “I mean it’s genius, but it’s bad.”
Trump singled out for praise James O’Keefe, the right-wing activist whose Project Veritas organization once tried to plant a false story in the Washington Post. In May 2010, O’Keefe and three others pleaded guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor in a scheme in which they posed as telephone repairmen in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans district office.
“He’s not controversial, he’s truthful,” Trump said of O’Keefe.
In lengthy remarks, he said: “You’re challenging the media gatekeepers and corporate censors to bring the truth to the American people. You communicate directly with our citizens without going through the fake news filter.”
Earlier Thursday, Trump sent a stream of Twitter messages lashing out at social media companies and the media, familiar targets that resonate with his conservative base.
The meeting represented an escalation of Trump’s battle with companies such as Facebook, Google and even his preferred communications outlet, Twitter, where he has an estimated 61 million followers.
Representatives for Facebook, Google and Twitter have declined to comment specifically on the White House meeting. The Internet Association, the industry’s major trade group representing Facebook, Google and dozens of other companies, said online platforms “are the best tool for promoting voices from all political perspectives in history.”
“Internet companies are not biased against any political ideology, and conservative voices in particular have used social media to great effect,” the group’s president Michael Beckerman said in a statement Thursday. “Internet companies depend upon their users’ trust from across the political spectrum to grow and succeed.”
Facebook has banned extremist figures such as Alex Jones of Infowars and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Twitter has banned hate speech on the basis of someone’s race, gender and other categories. Twitter broadened its policy this week to include banning language that dehumanizes others based on religion, and the company said it might also ban similar language aimed at other groups, such as those defined by gender, race and sexual orientation.