US President Donald Trump’s signing of an Executive Order to bring social media giants under regulation was well overdue and welcomed by Australia One leader Riccardo Bosi.
President Trump was driven to sign such an order after Twitter applied its biased “fact check” to a tweet made by him regarding the likelihood of widespread fraud if mail-in voting was used for November’s presidential election.
“But Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, responsible for the platform’s ‘fact checking’, has a history of radical bias,” Mr Bosi said.
“This man even went so far as to say that those US states won by the Republican Party in the 2016 presidential election were ‘states that voted for a racist tangerine’.”
Studies carried out at New York’s Columbia University have found that Twitter censors conservatives over liberals at a ratio of 21:1.
“President Trump’s recent tweet is backed up by a bipartisan federal election reform report of 2005 that concluded absentee ballots remained the single largest source of voter fraud in US elections,” he said.
“And the chairman of that reform committee was former Democrat US President Jimmy Carter.”
President Trump said social media giants Facebook and Twitter had been censoring posts based on editorial decisions or political bias and that the two platforms should be placed under the same rules and conditions as other media companies.
Until now, they have been exempted from litigation for their actions because they operated under common rules of social engagements.
This order will direct the US Federal Communications Commission to develop rules for social media platforms to remove their protection from prosecution if they engage in censorship.
Mr Bosi said this will have immediate ramifications for all global citizens.
“Australia One has already suffered several incidents of shadow-banning and censorship of our social media posts,” he said.
“We look forward to the possibility of a level playing field on social media and the hitherto silenced voices of the millions of ‘quiet Australians’ finally being heard.”