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Liberal Legal Scholar Slams Twitter Over Censoring Trump; Declares 'Free Speech' Ultimate 'Loser'

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Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law scholar recently warned that Twitter’s choice to fact-check and hide certain tweets from President Trump threatens the concept of free speech in the Unites States.

Turley, a liberal, published a blog Friday that said, “Twitter is now making the case for government action to monitor and control social media. The ultimate loser will be free speech.”

Thursday night, President Trump reacted to some of the violence and looting happening in the city of Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd, calling those responsible for the chaos “thugs” and threatened to cut loose the military in the city to get control over the situation.

In a now hidden tweet, Trump said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Twitter then hid the tweet, requiring users to click an arrow in order for it to be seen, stating that it broke the rules by “glorifying violence.”

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Here’s more from The Washington Examiner:

“I am still leery of the government intervening on social media,” Turley wrote. “Free speech has few advocates in this fight. It is primary a struggle between Twitter, Trump, and the Democrats over who controls such speech.”

Turley said he did not agree with the content of Trump’s tweets about the Minneapolis protesters but that they should not be censored.

“Twitter had the chance to admit error and return to neutrality in the interest of free speech. It is clearly more concerned with expressing its views than preserving its forum,” he said. “Frankly, I would not care about such self-inflicted wounds except that free speech will likely suffer the collateral damage from Twitter’s glorifying speech controls.”

Turley is right. Twitter has had plenty of opportunities over the last few years to change their strategies involving the engagement of content posted to their site. Instead, they chose to go along with the agenda pushed by progressives and go the route of censorship. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

This wouldn’t even be an issue if social media platforms weren’t trying to desperately to become hubs of information sharing because more active users equals more advertising revenue. But since they want to be publishers, they need to behave like publishers, and that means not silencing someone’s voice or opinion just because it isn’t a liberal one.

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