Neil Cavuto claims Twitter fact-checked Trump because he was wrong

Stephen Proctor
Updated ·4 min read

On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies in response to Twitter fact-checking two of his tweets in which he posted potentially false or misleading information about mail-in voting just a couple days earlier. In the tweets, Trump claimed that mail-in ballots would be wrought with fraud, including forged ballots and millions of unregistered voters in California receiving ballots, all unsubstantiated. Fox News’s Neil Cavuto, as he tends to do, called out the president and agreed that Twitter was right to fact-check Trump.

“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 he was being policed on that. He was being policed on that because he was wrong,” Cavuto said. “He was 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 executive order Trump signed on Thursday calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that would remove legal liability protections for social networks like Twitter. As the law is currently written, it lets companies like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to moderate the content on their sites as they see fit, while protecting them from lawsuits over what gets posted. Twitter called the executive order a reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law.

Cavuto thinks Trump might not like the consequences of this new order.

“He might be careful what he wishes for on this,” Cavuto said. “Because if you are limiting their protection from any legal action because of something users are saying, that could presumably 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’s what the president has set in motion here.”

Before Trump signed the executive order, Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano agreed with Cavuto and said that if this order were to take effect, companies would be much more selective about what they post, and that could be bad for Trump. He also believes the order may be unconstitutional.

“Look, they could terminate his account this afternoon if they want. They have no obligation to run anything that they don’t want to and the government has absolutely no right whatsoever to censor what they run, or … to get inside the inner workings of Twitter. That’s quite simply immunized from government scrutiny by the First Amendment.”

Napolitano also said this order flies in the face of a favorite Supreme Court ruling among conservative circles: Citizens United. The ruling states that corporations have freedom of speech.

“The president can condemn it, he can use other means to communicate, but he can’t use the powers of the government to interfere with the free speech of the people who own or operate Twitter,” Napolitano said. “If he does, or if he attempts to do so, it’s very easy for me to say, the courts will interfere with it.”

Your World With Neil Cavuto airs weekdays at 4 p.m. on Fox News Channel.

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