President Donald Trump is escalating his war on social media companies, signing an executive order challenging the liability protections that have served as bedrock for unfettered speech on the internet.
The executive order is actually the interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), which provides liability protections for contents published on social platforms and gives the operators the opportunity to moderate them.
Trump announced that this executive order deprives those social media operators who are censoring the content from the possibility of legal protection. He also mentioned that he will work on the details of this regulation with Attorney General William Barr, and cuts federal funding for social media platforms that controls freedom of speech.
Social platforms operators have had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.
Trump’s executive order further instructs the Ministry of Commerce to ask the Federal Communications Commission to clarify the Section mentioned. Furthermore, the government submits a bill to the Congress, that proposes some modifications of the law of 1966.
The executive order directs executive branch agencies to ask independent rule-making agencies including the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to study whether they can place new regulations on the companies — though experts express doubts much can be done without an act of Congress.
The president's action appeared to be more about politics than substance. He aims to rally supporters after he lashed out at Twitter for applying fact checks to two of his tweets concerning the fraud risks of nationwide mail-in balloting. The move immediately backfired: Experts disputed that Trump's tweet was actually misleading, in part because mail-in balloting has been linked to ongoing fraud; Twitter's fact-check itself contained false statements; and Twitter failed to apply the standard of review to other users.
Author: AP writers Amanda Seitz, Barbara Ortutay and David Klepper contributed.