US President Joe Biden vows that he would call for the Congress to further chip away at peaceful free speech on social media in an attempt to fight against “white supremacy” and “racism.”
During the recent United We Stand summit at the White House on Thursday, Biden dragged social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and claimed that they should be held “responsible” for those who post “hate speech” on their platforms.
The president then urged the Congress to completely remove the legal protections that shield companies to make them answerable to the law if users post what he called a “hate speech”.
However, the challenge here is that the term “hate speech” “these days can mean absolutely anything that the left doesn’t agree with or finds offensive. It rarely works the other way around,” the trending politician commented.
Pres. Biden is calling on Congress to hold social media platforms accountable for their role in helping propagate hate-fueled violence pic.twitter.com/jHbZoZ0Kd8— NowThis (@nowthisnews) September 15, 2022
“White supremacists will not have the last word,” Biden said before adding “so we convened this summit to make clear what the story of our time must be. It has to be a story in which each and every one of us has a vital role to play, a story. with this message from the White House: United united, united, we stand.”
“And hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hate and fuelling violence,” the president added.
“I’m calling on Congress to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements on all of them,” he continued.
The president then started talking about the controversial story of a white supremacist in Virginia whose behavior inspired him to run for president in 2020.
“When those folks came out of that field carrying torches – in the United States of America, carrying torches, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile that was chanted in Germany in the early 30s, accompanied by white supremacists holding Nazi flags. And I thought to myself: My God, this is the United States of America. How could it happen?” Biden said.
The event at the White House came weeks after the president proclaimed that “extremist” Republicans are a threat to democracy.
He also addressed the criticism that the speech was divisive on Thursday.
“Silence is complicity, we can’t remain silent. There are those that say we bring this up, we divide the country. Bringing it up we silence it,” he added.
