Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called on Bill Gates and other technology figureheads to “close up” the internet. Trump believes this would help prevent Islamic State (Isis) from recruiting Americans.

Speaking at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier in South Carolina on 7 December, Trump said he believed that “closing that internet up in some ways” would prevent acts of domestic terrorism in the US. During the same speech, Trump demanded that the US shut its borders to all Muslims.

Trump said: “We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain cases, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”