US President Trump threatens to regulate social media

US President Donald Trump threatens to ‘strictly regulate or shut down’ social media. He believes that the companies are trying to suppress the opinion of his party members. Twitter recently put a label on one of its tweets for the first time.

Trump does not comment in his tweet how that regulation would work. Party members of the president have been complaining for years that social media would try to suppress their views. The reason for Trump’s announcement seems to be the label that Twitter posted to some of his tweets, in which a link led to a fact check from CNN. It is the first time that Twitter has done this.

Regulating social media has been a topic of discussion in American politics many times. Trump has already been working on regulations last year that would dictate how social media should moderate, according to CNN.

In less than six months, there will be presidential elections in the United States and in the previous elections in 2016, Facebook was accused that Russian trolls spread fake news via the platform in order to influence the outcome. Since then, social media have created policies to prevent such influence. Twitter has not yet responded to the president’s statement.