White House Social Media Summit: Critics of Facebook, Google, Twitter Invited to Sound Off
President Donald Trump will host a social media summit on July 11th to address concerns conservatives have with Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
President Donald Trump is hosting conservative social media personalities at a White House summit on July 11 to air their grievances about Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
What’s unclear is whether big tech will have any representatives in the room. The summit will focus on “opportunities and challenges of today’s online environment,” according to the White House.
When asked whether they were planning to attend the summit, or if they had even received an invitation, a representative from Twitter told Fortune: “We don’t have anything to share.”
A Facebook representative declined to comment. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The guest list includes a who’s who of conservative groups. PragerU, an online video platform where conservative personalities, including Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro host shows, told Fortune they’ll be attending the summit.
PragerU has previously complained that YouTube has restricted or removed ads from some of its videos, which allow creators to make money. Some of the previous restricted videos included topics such as “Men and the Power of the Visual” and “Why Don’t Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?” according to the company.
Last year, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit PragerU filed against Google, alleging censorship. The organization is appealing one lawsuit in the Ninth Circuit Court and a second is filed in California State Court.
https://twitter.com/prageru/status/1143713436745863174
The White House has also invited representatives from the Heritage Foundation, and the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog. The Media Research Center has previously called on the Justice Department to investigate Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
President Trump has long claimed that social media companies have a bias against conservatives, and have limited his reach online. In May, the White House created a form that allowed people to report perceived instances of social media bias, but later said it was no longer taking submissions after receiving “thousands” of reports.
Trump, a social media superstar, despite the alleged bias, continued to blast the social platforms as being “against” him. In an interview with Fox News on Monday, he said Twitter doesn’t “treat me right.”
“And I know for a fact, I mean, a lot of people try and follow me and it’s very hard. I have so many people coming up that they say, ‘Sir, it’s so hard. They make it hard to follow,” Trump says, without offering any specifics. “What they’re doing is wrong and possibly illegal. And a lot of things are being looked at right now.”