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Big day for social media fairness, says Trump on upcoming executive order
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order later Thursday that would roll back immunity enjoyed by social media platforms such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook for content posted on their websites, according to multiple US media reports.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order later Thursday that would roll back immunity enjoyed by social media platforms such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook for content posted on their websites, according to multiple US media reports.
“This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!” the president wrote in a tweet Thursday, reconfirming a White House announcement from Wednesday of the upcoming order. But he shared no details.
The order is chiefly expected to allow federal regulators to rethink a law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from 1998 — that absolves social media platforms of all responsibility or accountability for content posted on their websites, unlike a news publication. The law leaves it to the companies to regulate, or not regulate, their published content.
The executive order is also expected to provide for the Federal Communication Commission, an independent body currently headed by Trump-nominee Ajit Pai, an Indian American, to receive and review complaints of political bias of these platforms.
Lastly, the order is expected to prohibit federal ad-spendings on platforms found in violation.
Unidentified Trump administration official who spoke selectively to US news publications cautioned that the order was still a draft and could change.
And experts have said the order is very likely to be challenged and in courts and may not survive.
Trump and other Republicans have for long been calling for action against tech companies for a while now alleging they are unfairly targeted for censoring. The administration has had several iterations of the order that could finally be out later Thursday as signaled by the president.
Trump has been in a twitter-rage sinceMay 26 when Twitter deployed a rarely used tool to fact-check two linked posts by him mail-in ballots. “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.,” the president wrote, reiterating his opposition to a voting tool he himself used in the 2018 elections.
Twitter fact-checked the post, and the linked post.
“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” Trump raged in a tweet, accusing the social media company of interfering in the 2020 presidential election. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,” he wrote in a tweet on Thursday, and fired one more later in the day, alleging, “Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election.”.
Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, is not backing down, not yet. “We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make,” he wrote on twitter Thursday night, and added, taking a swipe at Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, “This does not make as un ‘arbiter of truth’.”
Zuckerberg, who has faced questions about content on Facebook, specially fake news, had told Fox News in a pre-recorded interview that private companies shouldn’t be the “arbiter of truth”. Trump had retweeted a post of Zuckerberg’s quote from the interview.
