But check warnings that. Donald trump u. S. President. Say its another attempt to censor a conservative voice with an election just 6 months away Media Companies speech. This is a. Welcome to the program and its. Donald trump is often called the tweeter in chief twitter is the us president s main social media platform its where he announces policies to more than 80000000 followers and ways attacked opponents and spread misinformation twitter is now in the president s firing line its placed a fact check warning on 2 trump tweets that falsely claimed postal ballots would lead to voter fraud the president accused twitter in a tweet of stifling free speech and silencing conservative voices the white house says trump is preparing to sign an executive order to review a law that protects social media under section 230. 00 of the u. S. Communications decency act Online Platforms are largely exempted from liability for content created by their users they have the freedom to remove content without facing lawsuits critics of the law say it aloud platforms to avoid responsibility for harmful content posted on their pages including hate speech and election related material a review would look into whether social Media Companies deceive people by picking and choosing what content to block and provide a way for people to report online censorship but twitter has been criticized for refusing to act on other trump tweets for example the president repeated a de bunked Conspiracy Theory that a t. V. Host and former congressman was involved in the death of an intern 1000 years ago despite calls to remove the posts twitter said they dont violate its terms of service. He. Lets bring in our guests all in the United States in alexandria we have a dolphin franco a former adviser to senator john mccain and a republican strategist in washington d. C. Derrick plum a Democratic State strategist and former Regional Press secretary for the Democratic National committee and in new york jim anderson chief executive of social flow a Technology Firm dealing with social media content Companies Welcome to you all gentleman jim if i can begin with you 1st of all this review that donald trump is suggesting how would it affect what people can see online on you tube facebook and twitter i think immediately it would not affect it all right hes talking about a review which implies a period of time its not clear how much of this is saber rattling right theres things you can do with an executive order those things you cant do theres probably litigation if they did try to do an executive order so i suspect you know in some sense twitter labeling 2 of President Trumps tweets President Trump responding back i think theyre both sort of staking out their position and probably the most likely scenario is that will just continue to see these kinds of skirmishes without necessarily any kind of significant action adolfo this is typical donald trump saber rattling is that this would never stand up in court an attempt to sort of control what social media displays. Well i dont know about that and i think sometimes that saber rattling the saber is actually used well have to see that the content and the scope of the executive order but theres certainly a lot that can be done regarding these issues that theres actually been quite a bit of bipartisan concern 2 years ago during the Russia Collusion Investigation for example senator mark warner here virginia rant of various ranking democrat in a Key Committee in washington d. C. Talked about the need to to review content and limit content but i think the bottom line on this i think marks record got it right yesterday when he announced that he didnt think twitter should be the arbiter of what is truth that is a really dangerous path and you keep mentioning President Trump is twitter prepared to review the content of every one of its users for Fact Checking and every politician that tends to have views it sometimes can be perceived as something about facts when it just simply an opinion and i think in fact in this mail fraud issue its largely the president s opinion and hes perfectly entitled to have a lot of people suspect that there has been and can be abuse in this area so i think its a very dangerous path for twitter and opens up the floodgates for something that can be very difficult for that platform to regulate but lastly there are there are things that can be done about with the Justice Department in the executive Branch Branch i trust issues for example breaking up the social media giants i think thats a big concern and we did it with Telephone Companies weve done it with other industries if it becomes a partisan issue and twitter does have a partisan agenda and its not republican ok well derek should the social Media Companies be allowed to police what is what is put on their platforms. Yeah so what i would say is its really unfortunate that the leader of the free world arguably the most powerful man in the world continues to. Perpetuate promote falsehoods mislead the American People. The world through various social Media Channels lets be honest here whats what twitter did was the bare minimum as of april 3rd the Washington Post fact checker has. Flag that in the 1170 days that President Trump has been in office he has stated 18000 times either false or misleading statements and that is whats really the problem here i think you know the platforms have a responsibility and i think there is this idea that because in some ways it seems democratize because anyone can go online and say whatever they want to say that that therefore means that they are actual fair platform but the reality is is that depending on how much money you have because you can place ads given your voice then you can actually probably dates some of these conspiracy theories and crazy things that President Trump continues to do and i really think it is a disservice and so look i think there is a responsibility on the social media platforms like twitter and facebook you know Donald Trumps campaign has been running misleading and false advertising on both the platforms i actually think Mark Zuckerberg has gotten it wrong i mean when they know that the president is lying in his ads and they do nothing about it that is a disservice to their to those folks to actually use those platforms and to the American People an argument democratic process jim just help us understand why a tweet about mail in ballots crossed twitters line when so many of the tweets havent what was the difference. Well i think that illustrates the challenge here i mean everybody is asking that question and they have a fairly specific answer you know that gets into this sort of arcane or reserve their policies i think its really striking though that they did not take action on all the tweets about Joe Scarborough and him allegedly being involved somehow with the death of a former employee those were getting a lot more coverage and attention as being offensive and including the woman who passed away her husband widower writing in his twitter saying please take this down and twitter refuse yet they did label the mail in ballots and i think that there are view is thats more of an objective fact male and balloting has been studied it cetera and again i mean i think it gets into the challenge here of what truly is a fact versus an opinion is indeed a very slippery slope adolfo the sadness of the voting process is so crucial and so integrity to a democracy is that no line that can be crossed when youre posting on twitter this is fundamental to americas democracy the fenice of voting and there is no evidence that the house bid the mail in ballots have been interfered with in some even sufficient to adjust the out of an election. I find it very difficult to believe in a country of 320000000 people that never has mail in ballot ever been abused so its a matter of degree and a matter of opinion i am really quite as an american but shocked to hear some of the commentary by my colleagues i think theyre quite dangerous in a country but liberals have advocated for so long free speech and the ability to have opinions people can ignore about the tops of opinions and then the Fact Checkers were the Fact Checkers who checks their facts to say the Washington Post and the New York Times and twitter all the left wing liberal leaning democrat organizations whether there be republican for that matter are the Fact Checkers my question is who is Fact Checking and where are all the publications and retractions of the Washington Post and the New York Times when they get things wrong this is the problem and jim has said it correctly on this program is and Mark Zuckerberg or did get it right or not these and on think that donald trump plan once you go down this road are president obamas comments about you keep your doctor and your Health Care Costs are going to go down that kept repeating these lies on social media after it was proven by governmental agencies that this wasnt true i never complained about it this is just a matter of opinion so the question is who is the police here is do we want to entrust a partisan newspaper in washington d. C. To be the fact checker for the American People or twitter which held rallies in favor of Hillary Clinton in its offices and crying when she lost in are now trying to manipulate the election because it has an effect ok social media platform their response is simply put your own posts up and say the president wrong derek go ahead sorry if i may i think its dangerous here it is actually continuing to to attack the free press which the president has done since before he got to office and if we really want to have a conversation about whos being honest here. I dont think ill want to go there when it comes to Donald Trump Trump lied about the size of it as an operation proud he lied about the impact that coke would have 15 people would only die now just 100000. Threshold unfortunately because of his incompetence and terrible leadership ok but very very little to talk about the lives derreck of them have also talked about a lot about social Media Companies being controlled by liberal elites fire little who are liberally minded why but that is the conservative argument against control of whats on social media. And again i think look i think weve seen this throughout history when you dont like the facts and you try to attack those that are actually reporting them and i think weve seen that from donald trump and i think weve seen that from the g. O. P. And whats ironic here is that all the work for a man who was actually in had integrity john mccain and was a truth teller but the reality but the reality is is that you know there are facts and there are opinions and donald trump has continued to put out lies to the American People into the world and we actually have to call those things out and again when there is a standard for for instance when you put an ad in a campaign and you want to run it on television there are standards because you cannot put up dishonest and i think that social media platforms have the responsibility of the same thing what Mark Zuckerberg. What Mark Zuckerberg has done is really try to abdicate their responsibility and that is really problematic ok i have to. Be back in a 2nd i promise jim. Is this is it because its an Election Year that twitter has started to pay a bit more attention is that whats happening now theyre worried about was going to happen 6 months on the road i suspect that has a factor in volved here i mean you know this is if you want to look at it as a trial balloon were still 6 months or so out from the election one could only imagine the level of sort of rancor that would be here if we were the day before the election so i think twitter has been receiving a lot of criticism from democrats and people broadly on the left why arent you doing something now we see when they take action theyre going to receive a lot of criticism on the right and were going to have to try to find out what the right level is i do want to say though its really important your President Trump said hey im being censored and adolfo didnt use that word to his credit but a lot of people say this is censorship but if you look at what twitter actually did they added a label to the bottom of the tweet there was a little exclamation point and it was a statement is that get the facts right it didnt say this is a lie it didnt say were censoring this they didnt delete the tweet they added what they say is context around it and you can argue whether thats the right approach or not but its a fairly mild form of sort of letting people know that there may be another view out there and i dont expect President Trump or his campaign to like that or support that but lets be real clear here theres no censorship going on and as ive said it many times before if twitter is trying to censor donald trump theyre doing a pretty poor job of it right hes got 80000000 followers and he tweets in some cases more than a 100 times a day or a bill for just quickly point of james get the wasnt to send those no censoring that was just highlighting the fact there were alternative views. Well i agree i never used the word censorship and i dont think the president was censored i think theres a concern that will be the next step and then of course there was a link that was in my opinion just a link when a point of view on there and to what to to it to rebuttal that that twittered self decided it will be it went beyond just an advisory it had a link to it to other to other information that i think you know as an opinion and then of itself i find it curious though that when i would talk about free speech and an attack on the press and donald trump attacks the press the vicious attacks on conservative press namely but Fox News Network in the United States that seems to be open game for liberals but my god when you attack their point of view its sacrosanct i think jims point and your excellent questions about the election are the key here. Everybody knows where twitter and Silicon Valley stand and hollywood in the us politically and there is actually jims absolutely right theres an enormous amount of democratic pressure and this is an Election Year the president s most effective medium has been and probably his election was thanks to twitter and social media in general so there is this pressure theres a political undertone now i think the path to the executive order thats coming out today and later ron is innate i think youre going to see this there is a lot of pressure that can be applied by the executive branch without law on antitrust matters and i believe ultimately free press doesnt mean you get to have a monopoly in this country to happen one point of view so if it twitter is as a political bias which it does and its monopolising social media in the country or facebook and i think that is months Mark Zuckerberg are. Concerned he has no fan of donald trump is that we just break up these social media conglomerates and make them smaller and conservatives have a bigger voice that we dont get as a result of this unfortunate about ok derek do you get a sense that what weve seen in the last few days a taste of things to come ahead of the election donald trump is a very effective use a of social media how does a democratic strategist counter that its. Yeah so i think theres a couple things i want to say one i think what were seeing around donald trump and what we see by those who continue to support him is this echo chamber of ignorance where there is conspiracy theories innuendos outright falsehoods that are stated and its continually perpetuated on outlets like fox news and others and i think thats really really problematic because its doing disservice to our democracy and i if i could real quick in terms of on the male ballot piece i think its really ironic that the present the United States who moved his residence to florida voted by mail is now saying is trying to undermine their legitimate form of boulder engagement i also think its ironic that the president the United States and the g. O. P. Have for decades tried to undermine the ability for people to effectively exercise their vote and that is going to be i think a challenge that we as americans are going to have to really confront i think as a strategist you know one of the things that you have to make sure that you do is continue to put truth out there continue to hold these folks accountable and thats not only our elected officials but i think its also those that are those platforms so again well when facebook purposely allows or knowingly allows false information to be put on their channels by elected officials and say well thats free speech thats problematic when conservatives want to defend the ability for someone to its its always ironic that when people want to spew hate lies misleading information whats its about free speech but when people exercise their actual freedoms in terms of actually speaking truth to power then thats a problem and i think thats a reality that rocketing our race jim how important will social media be in the run up to this election im thinking because of the way that rallies may be restricted because of coronavirus concerns of the bay less nor Mainstream Television exposure for the candidates how important would social media be in the in this context. Its incredibly important you both to engage you know individual users and perspective voters but also look at one of the things that donald trump has demonstrated the ability to do very well is to control the narrative and the agenda look at what were talking about and weve done some studies before that show that yes he gets a tremendous amount of reach from his tweets hes got 80000000 followers he tweets quite for a full prolifically you can sort of figure out what the reach is but he gets an enormously greater reach from all the Media Coverage he draws into what he says he sort of uses twitter to set the agenda to set the conversation and then everybody including the media reacts to that and that gives him an enormous power to sort of set what people are talking about and hes proven very effective at doing that adolfo the president is very effective at using twits in the run up to november how important will use of social media be do you think as i say because of perhaps restrictions on rallies concerns about large gatherings that sort of thing how i will social media play. Oh i have to agree with everything jim has said and even more so because the president s rallies which also now only really was happening extensive conservative Media Coverage in the country the liberal press largely dropped that certainly that the live coverage of it there is now is less of an opportunity for the president to to reach out to to his particular his base in the supporters were of course was trending this way i have a very good friend a dear friend believe it or not derek on the on the Biden Campaign at the top levels and even before this situation they were extremely concerned about the president s effective use of social media and his vast network and that that the advantage that he has it isnt exactly that and as he has proven that in 2016 i do have to correct the record here and this is the problem frankly with when we say facts and truth telling in Fact Checking the president and the republicans have never been against absentee ballot or in fact is even any in any way you know when youre away from from home or work or inability to eat their vote early or to send in absentees president been doing it millions of people have been doing it theres a difference between menace and sending out unsolicited ballots to an activated voters and this is the problem right here in this program that has demonstrated what twitter has gotten itself into and this is another with the with well the respect to you derek on this as a bashing of the conservative media as an echo chamber because its not your point of view but when you see the New York Times the extreme left in this country in my opinion and other newspapers you see them as independent arbiters correcting the facts or twitter when they have a clear political bias almost a 3rd in their front pages so this is the problem this is the problem in a free if we have a free country that you cannot have an arbiter of these call facts other than its a sunny day to day or the day of the week this is the problem we face derek ill let you go very quickly but let me. Go ahead. Now look i get it when the facts dont go your way you dont want people to talk about it so i understand that but for anyone to credibly say that donald trump has not misled the people has not lied about things is just either burying your head in the sand or refusing to acknowledge that the reality on the militia say here on the on the voting piece if you recall donald trump when he lost by millions of votes he lost millions of votes on the popular vote to Hillary Clinton set up this Voter Commission because of fraud except nothing ever came of that because it wasnt a reality and the fact that you have i live in maryland right across the bridge from alexandria and we did receive ballots you have a republican governor we have a Democratic Legislature and any idea or notion that all the senate that foments fraud is is its absurd and we have to actually speak truth to power down to have a small d apple is not about times getting a head around it but just let me very quickly ask you both ivan is not as good a social media operator is donald trump is not a concern for the democrats in the run up to november. Well i dont think that as big of a concern and heres why if you recall about a week or so go down to. President obama tweeted one word ot and it was not only trending but he has retreated millions of times and so unfortunately you know instead of actually leading the country during a terrible terrible make that could have been mitigated much better and handle much better our commander in chief is on twitter and so i would rather. Joe biden continue to focus on beating down trump utilizing the platforms that we have but this election is not going to be won or lost on twitter. All right and finally can i just ask you jim any likelihood do you think that twitter would ever contemplate removing donald trump from his platform or is too big to block that seems cool wildly unlikely is the president the United States and so you can have your opinions you can have your policy your standard i think if we think that dustup were seeing right now is significant over adding labels to 2 tweets if they actually tried to remove him i think that would be a terrible strategic move for them i think its got implications to democracy and to just say hey the president the United States cant use our platform i doubt very seriously they would do that or unfortunately gentlemen we are out of time booked thanks to Adolfo Franco to Derek Plummer and to jim anderson and thank you too for watching you can see the program again any time by visiting our website aljazeera dot com and for further discussion go to our Facebook Page facebook dot com forward slash a. J. Inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter we are a. J. Inside story and i am at 0 for me Bernard Smith and the whole team here in doha by foot. Water scarcity has become a major global issue the demand is going straight up and the supply is going straight down turning an essential Natural Resource into a commodity traded for profit just because its lloyd doesnt mean its going to be priced what about the guy that can afford it guys tell me its water in a new 2 part series aljazeera examines the social financial and Environmental Impact of water privatisation loads of water coming soon egypt strongman is ruling within a fire and faced on the silence from his allies is deafening the u. S. Was perfectly happy to trade off the mark for sea for security while western leaders turning a blind eye when even their own citizens have fallen victim to his repression executions torture or censorship is not acceptable and you wont hear such strong words from lets say berlin or paris or london our man in cairo on aljazeera a firsthand glimpse of the challenges faced by journalists in the age of donald trump we are fighting the fake tears fake phoning the enemy of the people through the eyes of a federal White House Correspondent what do you base your legs on it leigh sales are down the press is not after a truck goes after the blacks were not the enemy of the people we are the usa the current Battle Ground whos to freeze it anyway on. Every generation has a higher purpose. Ours. This is al jazeera. This is news coming up in the next 60 minutes the protests turned violent in the u. S. 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