Judge Napolitano: 'Twitter has freedom of speech just like you and I and the president himself'

Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano told “America's Newsroom” Wednesday that President Trump is “right” that social media platforms show bias against conservatives, but added that as a private company, Twitter has the right to control speech on their platform.

“The president is ... understandably not happy about his being fact-checked. I mean, nobody would [be],” said Napolitano, who emphasized that Twitter is a privately owned and publicly held company, and the First Amendment only applies to government-regulated institutions.

“The government does not regulate Twitter,” Napolitano said.

TWITTER EXEC OVERSEEING FACT CHECK EFFORT HAS HISTORY OF ANTI-TRUMP TWEETS

Earlier Wednesday, Trump warned social media giants that the federal government could “strongly regulate” or “close them down” if they continue to “silence conservative voices,” his latest salvo in a running battle with Twitter after the platform fact-checked one of his tweets for the first time this week.

It is unclear what authority, if any, the president was citing in his threat, but the tweets surely were meant to escalate pressure on the platform that hosted them.

Napolitano stated that Twitter can “take down, modify, or correct any user [of its platform] at once, including the president of the United States."

“As for his threat to regulate or put Twitter out of business, that, of course, would require legislation which is somewhat unlikely between now and November," he added. "There also would be legal issues if the effort were aimed at silencing someone who has the freedom of speech."

"Look, I don’t like what they say, but I’ll defend to the death their right to say it," he went on. "Under the Supreme Court's opinion that the president likes called 'Citizens United,' Twitter has freedom of speech just like you and I and the president himself.”

Twitter slapped a warning label on one of Trump’s tweets for the first time Tuesday, cautioning readers that despite the president’s claims about mail-in ballots, “fact-checkers” say there is “no evidence” that mail-in voting would increase fraud risks and that “experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”

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Within minutes, the president accused Twitter of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post,” while adding that the platform is “completely stifling FREE SPEECH,” and vowing that “I, as President, will not allow that to happen.”

Twitter’s new warning label was issued even though a Twitter spokesperson acknowledged to Fox News that Trump’s tweet had not broken any of the platform’s rules, and even though some other experts have raised fraud concerns surrounding mail-in voting.

Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.