America’s White House held a social media summit on Thursday, 11th July 2019. The summit held to host key tech giants and conservative media chiefs.
However, reports suggest that they conspicuously omitted some tech companies from the guest list. In fact, major social media companies were excluded from the meeting.
According to the report, Donald Trump is hosting “a robust conversation on the opportunities and challenges of today’s online environment.” It added that Facebook, Google and Twitter did not make the cut. These three are the major social media companies in the United States.
Apparently, the duo was not deemed fit enough to be digital leaders fit for a presidential invite. However, the White House did not make the invite to the event public. It also did not make any comments about the event.
Trump had in an interview with Fox News where he accused the social media platforms of fighting him. He explained that they were doing illegal and wrong things.
The American conservative party, in the past, accused Facebook, Twitter and Google of shadowban. Twitter faced criticism recently for creating a new abusive behaviour notice feature. It aims at public officials perceived to violate the social media platform’s speech policies.
America’s online news site Vox described the summit as a ‘circus’. They called it ‘ugly’ and ‘paranoid’. “It demeaned the White House. It was also entirely in step with the Trump administration and Trump’s Republican Party,” the report added.
Verge also spoke on the summit. It said, “Today, those conspiratorial thinkers gathered together to complain about how social platforms limit their reach, in a high-profile public event that was covered widely by much of the media.”
Here are some clips from the summit that made it to Twitter:
Wanted to get the part where a guest at a White House function begins walking toward the press and James O’Keefe is filming and Joy Villa is showing off her FREEDOM gown. pic.twitter.com/ZPIXRRVo6K
— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) July 11, 2019
TRUMP at White House social media event: “The crap you think of is unbelievable!” pic.twitter.com/vxOxIZ8XAP
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2019
TRUMP on social media execs: “They’re not using what we gave them fairly & they have to do that…I don’t think the mainstream media is free speech either…free speech is not when you see something good & then you purposely write something bad…that’s very dangerous speech” 😳 pic.twitter.com/BtT8dN2P9M
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2019
Some even attributed the downtown experienced on Twitter last night to the Summit.
Apparently, Twitter let this happen on purpose to make a statement. Users experienced the downtime all over the world. Twitter later came back with an interesting tweet, “Miss Us?” They have since not tried to give any explanations about why the downtime occurred.
miss us?
— Twitter (@Twitter) July 11, 2019
I was upset that Twitter was down and then I find out its probably because Trump was hosting a social media summit and they just wanted to spite him and ruin the summit. I don’t mind pic.twitter.com/94ECiznlT0
— Graphics + Web + Sarcasm + Satire = Me 😊 (@WebDesignHer) July 11, 2019
Twitter celebrated the Social Media Summit by reminding us they have the Off Switch
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 11, 2019
Was there seriously a Twitter outage during the Social Media Summit?
— Dave Brown (@dave_brown24) July 11, 2019
So at the exact same time the WhiteHouse is hosting a Social Media Summit and discussing Big Tech censorship, @Twitter mysteriously stops working. Hmmm. Nice try with that “Watch what we control” moment.
— Pastor Greg Locke (@pastorlocke) July 11, 2019
On the bright side, Twitter being down during Trump’s social media summit is the closest it’s ever come to stopping hate speech on this platform. #TwitterDown
— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) July 11, 2019