Snapchat stokes GOP ire for refusing to promote Trump's account

The decision may be one of the strongest stances yet from a social media company on how to handle incendiary remarks from the president.

Snapchat drew a wave of repudiations from top Republicans but praise from Democrat Joe Biden after becoming the latest social media platform to penalize President Donald Trump for threatening violence against protesters.

The multimedia messaging company's decision to stop promoting Trump's account to other users instantly pulled the app's parent company, Snap, deeper into the Washington political-speech fight that has mainly focused on its peers.

Snap said it was reacting to threatening statements the president has made on other platforms, such as Twitter, not on Snapchat itself. And that made its action particularly troublesome, said one prominent Trump ally, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“At this point, it is no surprise to anyone that Big Tech doesn’t believe in free speech and will happily censor views with which they disagree. But this move is extraordinary even when measured by that low bar," Cruz, a frequent critic of the tech industry, told POLITICO in a statement. "Snapchat is explicitly censoring admittedly unobjectionable speech as punishment for completely unrelated speech off of Snapchat’s platform.”

The Trump campaign, which has railed against Twitter and at Silicon Valley more broadly over accusations they stifle conservative viewpoints, accused Snapchat and its leaders of "trying to rig the 2020 election, illegally using their corporate funding to promote Joe Biden and suppress President Trump."

"Radical Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel would rather promote extreme left riot videos and encourage their users to destroy America than share the positive words of unity, justice, and law and order from our President," Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.

Biden, in contrast, appeared to voice support for Snapchat’s decision — and take a dig at Trump — in a video posted on the platform Wednesday.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m proud to be able to run for president and still be on Snapchat,” the presumptive Democratic nominee said.

Twitter's decisions last week to slap fact-checking notices and warning labels on some of Trump's tweets prompted the president to call for regulators and Congress to roll back legal protections for online businesses. It also became the latest occasion for Trump and other Republicans to accuse the dominant social media platforms of pervasive bias against conservatives, despite a lack of evidence that such a pattern exists.

Trump last week signed an executive order that tasks federal regulators with taking a hard look at whether online companies' liability protections should be narrowed, dramatically escalating his feud with Silicon Valley. The... (Read more)

Tweets mentioned:

https://twitter.com/thematthill/status/1268317492092510211

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1266711223657205763

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