White House Petition Demanding Free Speech on Social Media Hits 100,000 Signatures

A White House petition demanding legislation for the First Amendment to be extended to digital public squares has reached 100,000 signatures.

The petition on social media, titled “Protect Free Speech in the Digital Public Square,” was created on Tuesday and has already amassed 100,000 signatures.

“The internet is the modern public square. It is where political campaigns are fought and won, where journalism is created and distributed, and where grassroots movements are born. Yet, the free and open internet has become a controlled, censored space, monopolized by a few unaccountable corporations,” declared the petition. “By banning users from their platforms, those corporations can effectively remove politically unwelcome Americans from the public square. That is repugnant to our shared values of free speech and freedom of the press.”

“The President should request that Congress pass legislation prohibiting social media platforms from banning users for First Amendment-protected speech,” the petition concluded, adding, “The power to block lawful content should be in the hands of individual users – not Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.”

This month, after CNN led a campaign to have Infowars and Alex Jones blacklisted from the Internet, Infowars was banned from Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Spotify, Pinterest, Apple podcasts, MailChimp, Disqus, and Vimeo, while CNN also successfully pressured Twitter into temporarily suspending Alex Jones.

On Thursday, President Trump declared that he would not “tolerate” censorship and political manipulation from Big Tech companies.

“I’ve made it clear that we as a country cannot tolerate political censorship, blacklisting, and rigged search results,” President Trump proclaimed. “We will not let large corporations silence conservative voices… We’re not going to let them control what we can and cannot see, read, and learn from, we can’t do that… America is a free country and we’re going to stay always a free country.”