Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren Spar Over Twitter’s Responsibility to Remove Trump

Kamala Harris threw down a gauntlet to Elizabeth Warren during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate. 

During a discussion of whether the candidates wanted to break up big tech companies, the California senator said she was “surprised” that Warren did not agree with her belief that Twitter should suspect President Trump’s account. “I urge you to join me,” she said. “Here we have Donald Trump, who has 65 million Twitter followers, and is using that platform as the president of the United States to openly intimidate witnesses, to threaten witnesses, to obstruct justice, and he and his account should be taken down.”

Harris continued, “This is a matter of corporate responsibility and Twitter should be held accountable and shut down that site. It is a matter of safety and corporate accountability.”

Warren responded with a catchphrase. “Look, I don’t just want to push Donald Trump off Twitter, I want to push him out of the White House,” she said, before turning the conversation to antitrust laws at large.

As Warren was talking, Harris continued to say “Join me,” to which Warren responded, “No.”

“No?” Harris asked, before Warren addressed “the real elephant in the room,” which is “how campaigns are financed.”

As she continued to speak, Harris said, “You can’t say you’re for corporate responsibility if it doesn’t apply to everyone.”

After Warren explained her campaign’s position on not taking large donations from corporate interests, Harris continued, “It does not represent a system of justice to say that the rules apply differently to different people,” before saying that her solution was about holding Big Tech “accountable,” which she believed Warren wanted to do.

Warren has been clashing with Facebook ever since a video leaked of CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that Warren becoming president would “suck” for the company. Last week her campaign released a video containing a lie to show that Facebook proliferated falsehoods on its platform.

On Tuesday, Twitter itself published a new explanation of how it will act if a world leader doesn’t follow its “Twitter Rules.” Including a list of scenarios when the platform would engage “enforcement actions,” the social platform also said, “In other cases involving a world leader, we will err on the side of leaving the content up if there is a clear public interest in doing so.”

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