Vance: Censorship is a threat to American democracy

2024-10-02 16:47:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Curbing free speech has become the biggest threat to American democracy, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed during a televised debate on Tuesday.

Donald Trump's running mate for the November election squared off against his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on CBS News.

Vance claimed that "instead of debating and persuading fellow Americans," Democratic candidate Kamala Harris "would like to censor people who engage in misinformation."

"Harris is engaged in censorship on an industrial scale. She has done so on a number of issues. This is a greater threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said protesters should protest peacefully on January 6 .

Vance was referring to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol building in Washington by Trump supporters after his election loss. Trump, whose public statements allegedly fueled the Capitol riots, faces four federal felony charges in the case. He is accused of acting illegally after the 2020 election, trying to overturn the result.

The former president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and denounced the case as an attempt to prevent him from returning to the White House. In a series of posts on his Social Truth platform in August, he called it "a direct attack on democracy" and a "resurrection of a dead witch hunt".

In the televised debate, Vance argued: "I believe we actually have a threat to democracy in this country. Unfortunately, it's not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It's the threat of censorship."

He went on to accuse the big tech companies of "silencing their fellow citizens."

In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to "censor" some Covid-19 content during the pandemic. He also acknowledged that Facebook suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden after an FBI warning ahead of the 2020 election.

"A president's words matter. January 6th was not in Facebook ads," Walz responded, on the issue of the January 2021 Capitol riots.

He asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance replied that Trump is "focused on the future."