Fox’s Howard Kurtz On Trump’s Threats to Twitter: He ‘Doesn’t Have the Authority to Close Down a Private Company’

Fox News host Howard Kurtz said Wednesday that President Donald Trump “doesn’t have the authority” to shut down Twitter, but acknowledged that he may be able to target the company’s tax breaks.

“Twitter has always maintained this fiction that ‘Oh, it’s just some community bulletin board,’ not a major media company, because it hasn’t wanted to spend the money to do its own fact-checking,” Kurtz said, responding to news that Twitter had fact-checked a tweet from the president about voting. “Now it’s trying to outsource it to other outlets, like CNN and The Washington Post, which the president and many conservatives view as liberal, and have certainly been very negative toward President Trump.”

Trump said in a Tuesday tweet that he would consider taking action against Twitter, writing, “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Kurtz said he empathized with conservatives, but that the president lacked the authority to shut the platform down. “I do have to say, I understand the president’s frustration here… Conservatives [feel] like the game is rigged against their point of view. But when the president says if Twitter doesn’t clean up its act, we will strongly regulate them or shut them down — the president doesn’t have the authority to close on a private company, even if it is biased.”

Anchor Ed Henry pointed out that the company is receiving federal tax breaks the president may be able to target, a point with which Kurtz agreed. He also said that social media companies were trying to get involved in the news industry without doing any of the heavy lifting.

“It certainly can be an ugly place,” Kurtz said. “Social media can be something of a box because it wants to make all this money — Facebook and Twitter, Google, you name it — from users, and at the same time, doesn’t want to do what a news organization does. Sometimes, you have to make difficult judgments about whether something is flat-out false, misleading, hate speech, or whatever.”

Watch above via Fox News.

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