‘Fake news less important than social media,’ says Trump ahead of WH social media summit

In anticipation of the White House’s social media summit, where online personalities will gather to discuss censorship on the web, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to put tech companies and the ‘Fake News Media’ on blast.

The summit will host a number of social media stars, many of them in the pro-Trump orbit, on Thursday afternoon, and will address the “tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination and suppression” practiced by social media companies, according to the president.

“We will not let them get away with it much longer,” President Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “The Fake News Media will also be there, but for a limited period. The Fake News is not as important, or as powerful, as Social Media. They have lost tremendous credibility.”

The president later deleted and revised his morning tweet storm. 

While no guestlist has been published, some of the invitees are known, among them Twitter memesmith ‘Carpe Donktum’, prominent pro-Trumper Bill Mitchell, right-wing journalist Jim Hoft, as well as other conservative organizations such as Turning Point USA and PragerU.

Political cartoonist Ben Garrison was initially expected to attend, but his invitation was rescinded after critics in the media circulated a cartoon he drew depicting billionaire financier George Soros as a puppet master, which they said amounted to a “blatantly anti-semitic” trope. Garrison said he agreed with the White House that his presence would be a “distraction from the president’s message.”

The summit has its conservative detractors as well, however, who argue that the White House didn’t invite anybody who was actually booted off a social media platform for their views.

“Have any of the people who got invited to the social media summit actually been censored by social media?” journalist Paul Joseph Watson asked in a tweet, adding “My invite must have got lost in the post.”

No social media executives were invited to the event.

Social media firms have come under increasing pressure since the 2016 presidential election to crack down on controversial voices and figures deemed “hateful” or “trolls,” but the platforms’ efforts to control content has prompted calls of censorship. Facebook has implemented a number of “purges,” scrubbing the platform of millions of accounts, including high-profile conservative personas like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer. Other platforms, like Twitter and YouTube, have followed suit, where perma-bans are becoming increasingly common.

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