Neil Cavuto Calls Out Trump’s ‘Shocking’ Threat to Shut Down Twitter Over Fact-Check: ‘He Was Being Policed on That Because He Was Wrong’

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto directly challenged President Donald Trump’s rhetoric after an Oval Office press briefing in which the president made a “shocking” threat to shut down Twitter because the social media site had fact-checked his tweets.

After a much-anticipated White House event detailing a new executive order that would revisit liability protections for social media companies — prompted by Twitter’s recent move to effectively label two of Trump’s tweets as misinformation — Trump came down hard on the platforms, decrying their “unchecked power” and accusing the private companies of “censorship” for policing the content on their sites. During the back and forth with the press, Trump even said he would explore using the power of the federal government to shut down Twitter.

That comment clearly alarmed Cavuto, who zeroed in on it when the White House event ended.

Calling the prospect of the government forcing a business to close “shocking,” Cavuto then proceeded to do a follow-up fact-check of the Trump tweets that Twitter had found in need of fact-checking.

Cavuto’s bold stance continues a trend of him very publicly calling out the president. Two weeks ago, the Fox host bluntly rebutted Trump’s comments hyping of the unproven Covid-19 drug hydoxychloroquine on not one but two separate occasions immediately following a White House briefing. The Fox host’s unapologetic pushback of Trump’s reckless advice even prompted a wounded Trump to retweet numerous critics of Cavuto and complain that “Fox News is no longer the same” and that he is “looking for a new outlet.”

On Thursday, Cavuto pointed out that Twitter was, in fact, correct that Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots in California were factually incorrect and highly misleading.

“He was open to shutting down Twitter. Whatever your opinions on the left or right, a huge, huge social networking site among the largest on the planet, and that since it was fact checking him, that’s good enough to crack down and maybe look at shutting down Twitter,” Cavuto said, his concern quite evident. “The issues that came to mind, one of them that prompted a quick fact checking on mail-in ballots is what got the president’s ire because he said that he was being policed on that. He was being policed on that because he was wrong. He was being policed on that because he said millions of illegals were getting ballots when that simply was not the case. So this isn’t a left-right issue. That was not the case. That was a wrong fact, that was a misstatement. Some have said it was an outright lie.”

“The president also was called on some outrageous comments he made about MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who had a young woman die in his Congressional Florida office some 20 years ago,” Cavuto pointed out, referring to a series of ugly, conspiracy theory tweets Trump has deployed to smear his political foil. “Never mind that Joe Scarborough wasn’t even there at the time, was about 800-900 miles away. The president was strongly implying, outright accusing that maybe something fishy was up and maybe that this was a case of murder.”

“Now, part of this investigation, crackdown on social media companies that claim legal liability or protection for that is that if people say outrageous things on a site, you know, viewer, reader, beware,” Cavuto noted before explain the unintended consequences of Trump’s social media scrutiny. “He took umbrage to it when it was done to him. So that’s really the genesis of all of this. But he might be careful what he wishes for on this. Because if you are limiting their protection from any legal action because of something users are saying, that presumably could include no less than the President of the United States, among Twitter’s biggest users on the entire planet. If they feel uncomfortable about something he is saying, next time, forget fact-checking him, they might have to take him down. That is what the president has set in motion here.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News.