Channel 1 Los Angeles
10/15/2020 Washington D.C.
Via Teleconference
QUESTION: Has any of this been brought to your desk? Has the State Department been asked at all to look into this? And could the State Department tell us if they know for sure if any of it is part of a disinformation campaign from Russia?
SECRETARY POMPEO: So I don’t want to comment on this. This is really not a State Department function. It’s a U.S. domestic set of issues here. But I will say this: There is a real challenge with some of America’s biggest technology firms banning, suspending accounts in a way that is inconsistent, that is viewpoint driven, that is ideologically driven. That’s simply unacceptable.
We’ve asked these firms in many cases to take down terror threat, terror – right? – when terrorists are trying to talk to each other on these. They’ve been good partners in that. But it can’t be the case that they can choose a political viewpoint and decide whether they’re going to allow that information to be on their network, on their system, on their social media apparatus simply because they find that the political viewpoint held by those who are trying to communicate are simply exercising their First Amendment freedoms. That’s just not the right thing to do.
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