No, Kamala Harris did not say X should be shut down

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has ended his independent bid for the presidency and endorsed the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

In recent weeks, Kennedy’s statements and posts online have been heavily critical of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

In one post, Kennedy suggested Harris wants to “shut down” the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, out of a desire to censor its owner, Elon Musk. Kennedy reposted a video with the caption “Kamala will shut down X if she wins.”

In the video, Harris says “He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down.” Kennedy claims in his post that “he” refers to Musk, implying “it” refers to X.

THE QUESTION

Did Kamala Harris say X should be shut down?

THE SOURCES

• CNN transcript of the full interview

• Archival recording of the full broadcast

THE ANSWER

No, Kamala Harris did not say X should be shut down. The clip is an old video presented out of context, in which Harris calls for Donald Trump’s personal account to be suspended.

WHAT WE FOUND

We searched for the text of the quote and found it in a transcript of an old interview Kamala Harris did with CNN after the Democratic primary debate on that network.

The partial quote is taken out of context from an interview in 2019, several years before Elon Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X. Harris was not advocating for the whole platform to be shut down; she was calling for Donald Trump to be banned from it.

During the Oct. 15, 2019 debate, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) called for Twitter to suspend then-President Donald Trump from the platform, and urged the other candidates on stage to do the same.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Harris about the exchange in the post-debate interview.

“One of the topics that you chose to talk a lot about, especially confronting Senator Warren on was your push, your call for Twitter to suspend the account of President Trump. Why was that important?” Tapper asked.

“You have to take seriously witness intimidation. You have to take seriously an attempt to obstruct justice. You have to take seriously a threat to a witness and really to their safety and potentially their life,” Harris said, referring to accusations that Trump was using Twitter to bully witnesses in the Ukraine-related investigation that would later lead to his impeachment.

“And when you're talking about Donald Trump, he has 65 million Twitter followers. He has proven himself to be willing to obstruct justice,” said Harris. “And we're talking about a private corporation, Twitter, that has terms of use, and as far as I'm concerned and I think most people would say, including members of Congress who he has threatened that he has lost his privileges and it should be taken down.”

Twitter eventually did ban Trump after the January 6 riots in 2021. Trump was reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company, but uses the site sparingly, electing instead to primarily post on the site he owns, TruthSocial.

VERIFY could not find any examples of Harris calling for a ban on X/Twitter.