A columnist Tuesday described why President Donald Trump's crackdown on factchecker visas was actually "personal, as everything with him tends to be."
The Guardian's Margaret Sullivan recounted how Trump's urge to "control the message," and a festering resentment from the past, has driven him to pull the visas and target international applicants who work on content moderation.
In early 2021, after Trump posted his claims about a "stolen election" that provoked the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Twitter decided to permanently suspend him.
"That evidently hurt. For years, Twitter had been his favorite place for bluster, bombast and straight-up lies," Sullivan wrote. "Other major social-media platforms locked him out too, at least for a while, and there were unsubstantiated charges that the platforms were colluding with Democrats."
Trump developed a disdain for people "who try to make the internet safer, to point out lies and misinformation," Sullivan explained.
That changed with Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter and renamed it X. Musk pushed out many workers on the content moderation team and Trump had conveniently formed his own social platform: Truth Social.
"But the pain of being barred has clearly lingered," Sullivan wrote.
And although Trump has claimed he was a victim of content moderation, "retribution lies at the heart of this crackdown."
"Thus, Trump’s special animus toward content moderators, trust and safety teams, and fact-checkers. It seems he didn’t forget the sting," she added.