White House representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Brad Parscale, the manager of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign, accused Mr. Spiegel of liberal bias and said, “Snapchat is trying to rig the 2020 election.”
Mr. Trump has been embroiled in a confrontation with social media companies since Twitter began labeling some of his tweets last week. He immediately accused Twitter, his preferred social media platform, where he has more than 81 million followers, of stifling his speech and meddling in the November presidential election.
In an apparent act of retaliation last Thursday, Mr. Trump signed an executive order intended to chip away at legal protections that internet companies rely on so that they are not liable for the content posted on their sites.
Twitter and others have denounced the executive order. Twitter has since pressed ahead in labeling more tweets by public officials, while Facebook has faced criticism for doing nothing about Mr. Trump’s posts. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, grappled with a virtual walkout on Monday by hundreds of his employees over the issue, but has continued defending his decision to leave Mr. Trump’s messages untouched.
Social media companies are entitled to enforce their own standards on speech, said First Amendment and social media speech scholars.
Snap’s decision “shows that companies increasingly understand that they do not need to be in the binary leave-up or take-down dynamic,” said David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “They have multiple tools to deal with the dynamics of the spread of hateful content, disinformation, harassment and other kinds of content.”
But the impact of Snap’s action is likely to be modest, said Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at the law school at St. John’s University.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/technology/snapchat-trump.html
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