Former President Donald Trump has pitched a "Digital Bill of Rights" that would "include a right to digital due process — in other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter," according to the New York Post.
Trump says it would include the right to be notified if large online platforms remove, "shadow ban" or throttle people's accounts, along with a right to an explanation and an ability to appeal. “In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose,” Trump said.
But Trump's proposal seems to contradict content moderation policies that already exist on his Truth Social platform. As Fox News reported back in January, Truth Social has some fairly strict content moderation policies already in place to ensure that the platform is a "family-friendly" online community.
Truth Social partnered with Hive, which uses AI to police images, videos, and text content.
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"We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place, and we are focused on making sure any illegal content is not on the site," Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes told Fox Business.
According to a report from Public Citizen in August, Truth Social "engages in inexplicable censorship of both conservative and liberal viewpoints."
“Truth Social is far from the haven of free speech that Trump promised, as even conservative viewpoints and links have been shadow-banned,” said Cheyenne Hunt-Majer, a fellow for Public Citizen and author of the report. “It’s not at all clear how Truth Social determines which content will be labled as sensitive, why some content is censored after it’s posted, and why other content seems to be preemptively blocked from appearing on the platform at all.”
