The Trump-Twitter fight ropes in the rest of Silicon Valley
Twitter's decision to fact-check President Donald Trump's tweets has vaulted Silicon Valley's biggest players into a political fight with Washington when they least wanted it.
The deepening feud between the president and his go-to social media platform is forcing companies like Facebook and Google to gird for a lobbying battle to defend the legal protections that underpin their lucrative business models, sooner and much more publicly than they had originally expected. Those preparations accelerated this week, even as Facebook made it clear to Trump that it doesn't share Twitter's view of how online platforms should handle political speech.
Now the industry has no choice but to wade into an increasingly partisan debate over free expression, in a preelection season already torn by tensions surrounding the pandemic, mass unemployment and racial unrest.
This is a debate that had been inside the Beltway that’s now gone national, and that means that advocates of online free speech need to prepare a national response,” said Carl Szabo, the vice president and general counsel at NetChoice, one of many tech industry trade groups responding to the Trump-Twitter showdown this week.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-trump-twitter-fight-ropes-in-the-rest-of-silicon-valley/ar-BB14OxaP?li=BBnb7Kz