Twitter details rules for political figures’ tweets

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) on Tuesday night went after fellow 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over her failure to get behind Harris’s effort to pressure Twitter into deleting President Trump’s account.

Over the past several weeks, Harris has launched a public campaign urging Twitter to delete Trump’s controversial account, which the president regularly uses to lambast his critics and promote misinformation. Last week, Warren, one of the top tech antagonists in the Democratic presidential race, declined to back Harris’s call.

“I was surprised to hear that you did not agree with me that on this subject around what should be the rules on corporate responsibility,” Harris said directly to Warren at the Democratic primary debate in Ohio. “When I called on Twitter to suspend Donald trump’s account … you did not agree.”

“I would urge you to join me,” Harris added.

Warren retorted she doesn’t agree with Harris’s approach to taking on Big Tech. “I don’t want to push Donald Trump off Twitter,” Warren said. “I want to push him out of the White House.”

Twitter is detailing its policies for world leaders as Democrats press the social media giant to take a tougher stance on President Trump’s tweets.

In a statement Tuesday, Twitter said that tweets from leaders “are not above our policies entirely.”

“When it comes to the actions of world leaders on Twitter, we recognize that this is largely new ground and unprecedented. We understand the desire for our decisions to be ‘yes/no’ binaries, but it’s not that simple,” the company said. “The actions we take and policies we develop will set precedent around online speech and we owe it to the people we serve to be deliberate and considered in what we do.”