Just two days after Twitter applied fact-checking notices on two of his tweets, President Donald Trump is said to be preparing an executive order aimed at limiting how social media companies are protected from being held liable for content on their sites.
The order is said to still be in the working phase, and its content could change before it is issued. According to the New York Times, two senior Trump administration officials confirmed that the order is in the works.
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 will reportedly argue that companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google give selective preference to certain types of political speech and will seek to give the Commerce Department greater authority to oversee how the section of the act is applied to social media companies.
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.
Trump’s ire grew after Twitter on Tuesday 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.”
Trump has resisted calls to expand the use of mail-in ballots in the election as a means by which to contain the spread of coronavirus by reducing individuals’ exposure to others in close-quarter areas.
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, would comment on the likelihood of Trump’s executive order.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based digital-rights advocacy group, said Trump’s prospective executive order is “the President’s 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.
