President Joe Biden speaks astir the CHIPS and Science Act, a measurement intended to boost the semiconductor manufacture and technological research, astatine communications institution ViaSat, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022, successful Carlsbad, Calif. | AP
President Joe Biden took shots astatine Twitter and its caller proprietor Friday night, calling retired Elon Musk by sanction and the societal media institution arsenic “an outfit that spews lies each crossed the world,” during a run lawsuit successful Chicago.
The comments came aft Musk rocked the institution with layoffs Friday morning, firing hundreds of employees including fractional of Twitter’s nationalist argumentation team.
Since Musk took implicit past week, Twitter users and politicians person voiced concerns astir imaginable changes to the app’s contented moderation policies and an summation successful the dispersed of misinformation connected the app successful the pb up to Tuesday’s midterms.
Musk had yet to respond to Biden’s comments arsenic of precocious Friday. In a tweet earlier Friday, Musk maintained Twitter’s “strong committedness to contented moderation remains perfectly unchanged.”
Amid the company’s turmoil, Musk has complained of “a monolithic driblet successful revenue” successful which helium blamed “activists groups pressuring advertisers” to propulsion their ads from the site, accusing them of “trying to destruct escaped code successful America.”
Musk himself tweeted retired a mendacious story astir the onslaught connected Paul Pelosi, hubby of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, earlier deleting it.
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre besides voiced interest astir societal media being utilized to disseminate lies and hatred Friday, though she declined to remark connected Musk oregon Twitter’s layoffs specifically.
“The President has been outspoken astir the value of societal media platforms continuing to instrumentality steps to trim hatred code and misinformation,” Jean-Pierre said. “That content extends to Twitter, it extends to Facebook and immoderate different societal media platforms wherever users tin dispersed misinformation.”
Jean-Pierre besides said Biden supports reforms wrong the tech sector, and “is acrophobic astir the powerfulness of ample tech platforms implicit our mundane lives.”
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