Trump Threatens to Shut Down Twitter in Twitter Tantrum About ‘Free Speech’

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President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning to whine about supposed bias against conservatives by social media companies, after the platform fact-checked his tweets about mail-in voting.

On Tuesday, Twitter said it was “working to expand existing product features and policies,” after the widower of former congressional aide Lori Klausutis wrote a letter to the company asking them to delete Tuesday tweets by Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., implying that MSNBC host (and Klausutis’ then-boss) Joe Scarborough may have murdered her.

The company so far hasn’t touched those tweets. But later in the day Tuesday, Twitter added a disclaimer to a Trump rant claiming that mail-in voting would be “substantially fraudulent.” Users who click the disclaimer are sent to a page fact-checking Trump’s claim.

On Tuesday night, Trump responded by charging, on Twitter, that Twitter was intervening in the presidential election by not allowing him to lie.

“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” Trump wrote.

On Wednesday morning, he went a step further, threatening to shut down social media companies that “totally silence conservative voices.”

“We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,” Trump wrote.

Despite Trump’s threat to “shut down” Twitter, as of this publication, he has tweeted five times in the past hour.

Cover: President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters during an event on protecting seniors with diabetes in the Rose Garden White House, Tuesday, May 26, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)