Former Twitter Exec Calls for Social Media to ‘Mute’ Trump Until After the Election to Stop Misinformation

A former Twitter and Google executive called for social media platforms to “mute” President Donald Trump’s accounts until after the election, citing his repeated violations of their terms of service by posting false claims and misinformation.

Speaking with Jake Tapper on Tuesday afternoon, Peter Greenberger, Twitter’s former global director of content partnership, news and an ex-head of industry relations at Google, acknowledged to the CNN host that his recommendation was an escalation. And it comes amid Twitter and Facebook facing a tsunami of backlash for limiting the distribution of a New York Post story purporting to release a laptop with Hunter Biden’s emails

“You said Trump should be silenced on both platforms until a winner in the election is determined. That’s a pretty extreme suggestion,” Tapper pointed out to start the interview. “Why do you say that?”

“It is, and extreme times demand extreme suggestions,” Greenberger replied. “I did not come to this opinion lightly. I believe the tech companies, generally, have a responsibility to be neutral. I think in the case of Twitter specifically, it’s been a great champion of the democratization of information as well as a strong supporter of freedom of expression. However, we are in a unique, and, I believe, a fraught moment in time with a president who is desperate and he’s facing a very difficult situation. I think the time is to mute the president, temporarily, while votes are being cast right now and until the winner is decided.”

Tapper, in a somewhat cynical defense of the president, pointed out that Trump’s habit of spreading lies and appearing to break the social networking platforms’ rules is by no means a new phenomenon.

“I mean, literally he burst on the political scene pushing the racist Birther theory, and the American people elected him,” Tapper noted. “Does that not suggest a certain desire of the American people to allow this kind of unhinged nonsense and lies and deranged conspiracy theories, that they’re okay with it?”

“As you say, he has been a reckless poster on Twitter, on Facebook and other platforms for the duration of his time in office and ever since he came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, ” Greenberger conceded, before calling out how Trumps has been enjoying special treatment not reserved for regular users. “It’s time, I believe, that Twitter hold him accountable to the same terms and conditions, the same rules of the road that every other user is subject to. They have been wrestling with and tying themselves up in pretzels in an effort to try to accommodate the president. They have taken laudable steps. They were the first to label the president with misinformation. I think that was a very bold, important move. And they’ve gone so far, as of today, I believe, of starting to turn off key engagement features of the platform in order to slow down this cause of misinformation.”

Greenberger went on to note that a recent Harvard mass media working paper, released earlier this month, concluded that the top source of election misinformation about mail-in voting fraud was the president himself.

“This is not coming from the dark corners of the dark web or social media, it’s coming from the president,” Greenberger added. “So perhaps it’s time to mute the president while we’re in this present time.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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