Social media users are misleadingly sharing an excerpt of comments Vice President Kamala Harris made years ago about former President Donald Trump’s Twitter presence.
An Instagram user shared a video Sept. 3 of Harris speaking with the caption, “Kamala Harris says she will shut down X if elected.”
In the excerpt shared on Instagram, Harris says:
He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. And the bottom line is that you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran in 2024 as an independent presidential candidate before dropping out of the race in August, and X owner Elon Musk amplified the claim by resharing the video.
The footage is from a 2019 CNN interview after a Democratic primary debate when she was running in the Democratic presidential primary.
In the full video of the interview, CNN host Jake Tapper asked Harris about her call “for Twitter to suspend the account of President Trump.”
Harris responded:
You can look at the manifesto from the shooter in El Paso to know that what Donald Trump says on Twitter impacts people’s perceptions about what they should and should not do…He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. And the bottom line is that you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.
Harris did not mention shutting down Twitter in the interview.
Twitter banned Trump on Jan. 8, 2021, after he used the platform to encourage his followers to protest the 2020 election results Jan. 6, 2021. Musk restored Trump’s account in November 2022 after buying Twitter.
We rate the claim that Harris said she will shut down X if elected False.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
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