President Trump inaccurately claims social media companies 'silencing millions'
Trump's attacks come as Facebook and Twitter move to suspend fake news accounts.
President Trump on Friday continued his tirade against social media companies who have moved to suspend accounts they have identified as intentionally disseminating fake news, inaccurately claiming "millions" of voices are being silenced.
"Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people," Trump said in a tweet. "Can’t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!"
The president's tweet followed an announcement by Facebook on Tuesday that it had identified and removed 652 accounts and groups it deemed had "coordinated inauthentic behavior," including several it said were linked to Iran and Russia.
Trump has previously accused social media companies of targeting only conservative voices in their recent crackdowns against accounts like that of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Facebook earlier this month removed content from several of Jones' pages and his organization "InfoWars," saying content promoted by their accounts violated their hate speech policies by "glorifying violence ... and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants."
Trump said during his campaign rally in West Virginia earlier this week that "every one of us is sort of like a newspaper."
"You have Twitter, or whatever you have, you have Facebook. But you can't pick one person and say, 'We don't like what he's been saying, he's out,'" he said. "So we will live with fake news.”
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