President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed limiting how social media companies are protected from being held liable for content on their sites and for practicing what he said was censorship against certain types of political speech.
At issue is a section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that gives liability protection to companies that moderate and curate information on their sites that has been created by site users. Trump’s order argues that companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google give selective preference to certain types of political speech and seeks to give the federal government greater authority to oversee how the section of the act is applied to social media companies.
At the White House signing ceremony, Trump said his order will “make it so that social media companies that engage in censoring any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield.”
The president signed the order two days after Twitter applied fact-check notices to two of the president’s tweets for the first time. The tweets claimed mail-in ballots for November’s presidential elections would be suspect to voter fraud across the country. After the tweets were posted, Twitter included a link to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”
….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Trump has used the possibility of voter fraud to resist expanded use of mail-in ballots in the election. Supporters of mail-in ballots have argued that their usage can help contain the spread of coronavirus by reducing individuals’ exposure to others in close-quarter areas such as polling stations.
Trump, who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter, and is well known for using the platform to tweet out everything from policy decisions to personal attacks against political opponents, went on Twitter Thursday to hint that his order was on the way.
“This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!” Trump tweeted.
A Twitter spokesperson said Trump’s tweets were flagged because they “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots. This decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
Neither Twitter, nor Facebook, immediately commented on Trump’s executive order.
Legal scholars said that the order brings up questions of just what the federal government can do to change the way social media companies oversee content on their sites.
“Aside from significant First Amendment defects, the order asks the Federal Communications Commission to promulgate rules that the FCC itself has said it has no authority to issue,” said Erik Stallman, associate director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley, School of Law. “The point of the executive order seems to be to dissuade social media platforms from flagging false statements by President Trump and his allies. The order needn’t be legally sound to accomplish that result.”
Trump himself said, “I guess it’s going to be challenged in court, but what isn’t?”
Prior to Trump’s signing of the executive order, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based digital-rights advocacy group, called Trump’s plans a from of “personal retaliation against Twitter,” and a threat against free speech.
“The draft Executive Order disregards the 1st Amendment & improperly attempts to circumvent Congress by rewriting the law that underlies much of our modern Internet. It mischaracterizes existing law to punish platforms whose ability to curate content is constitutionally protected,” the EFF tweeted Thursday morning.
The draft Executive Order disregards the 1st Amendment & improperly attempts to circumvent Congress by rewriting the law that underlies much of our modern Internet. It mischaracterizes existing law to punish platforms whose ability to curate content is constitutionally protected.
— EFF (@EFF) May 28, 2020
