President Trump on Thursday ramped up his war with social media companies by signing an executive order that aims to curtail their legal liability protections \u2013 two days after Twitter\u00a0slapped fact check labels\u00a0to a pair of his tweets about fraud in mail-in voting for the first time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced in American history,\u201d Trump said before\u00a0signing the executive order\u00a0in the Oval Office where Attorney General Bill Barr was present.<\/p>\n
Adv<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n \u201cA small handful of powerful social media monopolies,\u201d Trump said, \u201chad unchecked power to censure, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump declared, \u201cWe can\u2019t let this continue to happen, it\u2019s very, very unfair.\u201d<\/p>\n The president added, \u201cThis censorship and bias\u00a0is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. Social media companies have vastly more power in the United States than newspapers, they\u2019re by far more rich than any other traditional forms of communication.\u201d<\/p>\n Social media companies \u201cthat engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,\u201d Trump vowed, adding that companies \u201clike Twitter enjoy an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform \u2014 which they are not.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy executive order further instructed the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices,\u201d said the commander in chief who at one point held up a copy of Thursday\u2019s NY Post featuring a lead member of Twitter\u2019s policing team who once called the president a \u201cracist tangerine.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s order directs federal agencies to look at whether they can place new regulations on the tech giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no precedent in American history for so small a number of corporations to control so large a sphere of human interaction,\u201d said Trump who claimed that Twitter is making \u201ceditorial decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs president, I\u2019m not allowing the American people to be bullied by these giant corporations. Many people have wanted this to be done by presidents for a long time,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cI\u2019ve been called by Democrats that want to do this and so I think you could possibly have a bipartisan situation.\u201d<\/p>\n The order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 landmark federal law that largely exempts online platforms from legal liability for material posted by their users, allowing them to be treated more like publishers.<\/p>\n Rolling back those regulations would expose the tech companies to more civil liability thjrough lawsuits.<\/p>\n\n \u201cFree speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people,\u201d the order opens.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.\u201d<\/p>\n It goes on to note, \u201cToday, many Americans follow the news, stay in touch with friends and family, and share their views on current events through social media and other online platforms. As a result, these platforms function in many ways as a 21st century equivalent of the public square. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see.\u201d<\/p>\n In a clear reference to Twitter\u2019s fact check on Trump\u2019s mail-in ballot tweets and Yoel Roth, the social media company\u2019s executive who helped introduce the fact-check system earlier this month, the order says, \u201cTwitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician\u2019s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called \u2018Site Integrity\u2019 has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets.<\/p>\n Barr said the order \u201csets up a rulemaking procedure that will eventually be under the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to try to get back to the original interpretation and understanding of Section 230.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \u201cIt also empowers the Attorney General to work with state attorneys general to come up with model legislation that addresses this mistake,\u201d Barr said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re preparing federal legislation, which we\u2019ll be sending over shortly, for the consideration of the Office of Management budget.\u201d<\/p>\n Barr noted that the order does not \u201crepeal\u201d Section 230.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not against Section 230 if it was properly applied, but it\u2019s been stretched and I don\u2019t know anyone on Capitol Hill who doesn\u2019t agree that it\u2019s been stretched beyond its original intention,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The attorney general said the law has been \u201ccompletely stretched to allow it to become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material.\u201d<\/p>\n Barr compared the censorship to that of \u201cforeign governments like Communist China.\u201d<\/p>\n The order also calls for a review of \u201cunfair or deceptive acts or practices\u201d by the social media companies and for the FCC to determine whether actions like the editing of content by the tech companies should lead to the firms forfeiting the protections under Section 230.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s executive order calls on the government to reassess whether federal online advertising dollars should be held back from the social media giants if they \u201crestrict free speech.\u201d<\/p>\n Legal experts argue that any effort to modify Section 230 would be hit with a court challenge and is likely unconstitutional.<\/p>\n And Trump said he predicts \u201cthey\u2019ll be doing a lawsuit,\u201d but did not specify further.<\/p>\n When asked by a reporter during the signing of the executive order whether Trump \u2014 a prolific tweeter with more than 80 million followers \u2014 will delete his account, the president said, \u201cIf you weren\u2019t fake. I would do it in a heartbeat. If we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat. There\u2019s nothing I\u2019d rather do than get rid of my own Twitter account.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier in the day, ahead of the signing, Trump tweeted, \u201cThis will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!\u201d<\/p>\n\n On Tuesday, Twitter attached warning links to two of Trump\u2019s tweets in which the president claimed that allowing large scale mail-in voting would result in a \u201crigged election.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGet the facts about mail-in ballots,\u201d the label on the tweets state, and redirects users to news articles and disputing that voting-by-mail would allow for rampant fraud.<\/p>\n\n President Trump on Thursday ramped up his war with social media companies by signing an executive order that aims to curtail their legal liability protections \u2013 two days after Twitter\u00a0slapped fact check labels\u00a0to a pair of his tweets about fraud in mail-in voting for the first time. \u201cWe\u2019re here today to defend free speech from …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64398,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[38],"tags":[779],"yoast_head":"\n\r\n \t