Snap CEO says decision to limit Trump protected by First Amendment

Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, has a message for critics who cried badly about the company’s decision stop promoting President Donald Trump’s posts on the discovery page of Snapchat: Take on the Bill of Rights.

“We have always said that Discover is a closed platform, and we choose the types of content that we want to promote on our platform,” Spiegel told CNBC’s Power Lunch Thursday. “We are good at deciding what happens there under our First Amendment rights.”

The comments come after the company decided last week to stop promoting content from Trump’s account through Snapchat’s Discover feature. Snap took the step after Trump said in a tweet on May 30 that if demonstrators outside the White House broke the fence, they would be “greeted with the most vicious dogs and the most threatening weapons.” The remark was not shared on Trump’s Snapchat account.

Although users of the platform can continue to follow the president and view his posts, the move prompted the Trump campaign to accuse Snap of “trying to manipulate the 2020 elections.”

“Snapchat hates that so many of its users see the President’s content and are therefore actively campaigning to suppress voters,” said Brad Parscale, chairman of the Trump campaign, in a statement.

Spiegel defended the decision Thursday, saying there appears to be some “confusion” about the first amendment. “The first change is very specific. It is designed to protect individuals and private companies from the government,” he said.

“We want to use our rights to stand up for what we believe in,” he added.

“We are not currently promoting the President’s content on Snapchat’s Discover platform,” said a Snap spokesman in a statement last week. “We will not augment voices that encourage racist violence and injustice through free advertising on Discover. Racial violence and injustice have no place in our society and we stand with everyone who seeks peace, love, equality and justice in America.”

Snaps diversity report

Spiegel came under fire later Thursday when it was reported that he told employees he did not want to publish diversity numbers for the company. Diversity reports released by other technology giants, including Google, Microsoft and Intelshow the percentage of women and minorities employed in a company.

Snap says it’s about publishing the report now. “We are working on how we can best achieve this in the short term,” said a Snap spokesman in an emailed statement. Snap described the initial history of Business Insider as inaccurate and said that she was also working towards “plans for meaningful action”.

“Snapchat looks like most other technology companies in terms of representation,” added Spiegel during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. “We think this is a bad thing, not a good thing. So we were concerned that all of this information actually normalized the current makeup of the technical workforce.”