BY MELISSA GOLDIN, Associated Press
After a nationwide suspension billionaire Elon Musk’s X-platform in Brazil, social media users – including former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – distort a years-old video of Vice President Kamala Harris and falsely claim that the Democratic presidential candidate threatened to censor each X and Musk.
Here's a better have a look at the facts.
CLAIM: A video clip shows Harris saying that she’s going to shut down X if she wins the 2024 presidential election and that Musk has “lost his privileges.”
THE FACTS: That's false. Harris was referring to Trump long before Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X.
The clip Is from 2019 and shows Harris talking to CNN moderator Jake Tapper after a Democratic primary debate during which they discuss whether then-President Donald Trump's profile ought to be faraway from the platform then called Twitter and the importance of holding social media firms more accountable.
Kennedy, who put his presidential candidacy on hold on August 23 and supported Trumpused the clip in an X-post as alleged evidence that Harris was talking about Musk, stating, “Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT and not a 'privilege'?” He also offered his own interpretation of Harris' comments about social media sites basically, saying, “If they don't police content to conform to government-approved narratives, they get shut down.”
By Tuesday, the post had been liked and shared around 200,300 times.
Another popular post by X sharing the video simply stated, “Kamala will take out X if she wins.” The post has been liked and shared roughly 105,000 times. Other social media users claimed that Harris was speaking in support of a Brazilian Supreme Court judge who made the choice to dam X last week.
In longer footage of the interview, a part of CNN’s post-debate evaluation on October 15, 2019, Tapper asked Harris: “One of the issues you talked about a lot, especially when you confronted Senator Warren about it, was your urging, your call for Twitter to suspend President Trump's account. Why was that important?”
Tapper referred to the Moment in the talk when Harris criticized then-Democratic candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren for not pushing for such a suspension. Twitter eventually did Block Trump's account in January 2021, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” following the deadly riot on the US Capitol, with several other social media platforms kicking him off the web around the identical time. Musk Trump's account restored in November 2022 after purchasing the platform.
Harris replied in the course of the interview that Trump “has proven that he is willing to obstruct justice” and that what he says on Twitter “influences people's perceptions of what they should and should not do.”
She continued, “And as far as I'm concerned – and I think most people would say this, including members of Congress he has threatened – he has lost his privileges and the law should be repealed.”
Harris didn’t call for the closure of the whole platform. Instead, she called for greater accountability.
“Ultimately, you can't say there's one rule for Facebook and another for Twitter,” she explained. “The same rule has to apply, which is that these social media sites have to take responsibility for understanding their power. They're speaking directly to millions and millions of people without any oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.”
The exchange is reflected in Transcript from CNN the reporting.
The Harris campaign referred an Associated Press request for comment on the false claims to a Democratic National Committee spokesman, who declined to comment. Representatives for Trump and Kennedy didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Alexandre de Moraes, Judge of the Supreme Court of Brazil ordered X was blocked last Friday because he refused to appoint a neighborhood legal representative, as required by law. His decision was unanimously confirmed by a judicial committee on Monday. X had dismiss his legal representative from Brazil on the grounds that de Moraes had threatened to arrest it. The platform will remain blocked until it complies with de Moraes' order and pays outstanding fines.
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Here you could find AP fact checks: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
Originally published:
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