President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order cracking down on “censorship” by social media sites, a move widely seen by critics as retaliation against Twitter’s decision to slap fact-checking labels on the president’s tweets.
The executive order targets companies granted liability protection through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Under the statute, large social media companies cannot be sued for much of the content posted by others using their sites.
Without congressional action, however, there are limits to what Trump can do with the executive order. The president said Thursday that he would indeed pursue legislation in addition to the order.
Attorney General William Barr, who also attended the signing, said the Justice Department would seek to sue social media companies, saying the statute “has been stretched way beyond its original intention.”
The order would push the Federal Communications Commission to set new rules on some websites’ protections under Section 230. It would also encourage the Federal Trade Commission to take action against companies that engage in “deceptive” acts of communication, and it would form a working group of state attorneys general to review relevant state laws.
Barr earlier this year signaled the department’s intention to look “critically” at the law, originally designed to allow growing technology companies protection. But critics of the law have argued it allowed social media firms to turn a blind eye to unlawful content. It is unclear, though, on what grounds the Justice Department might sue.
While Barr said that the president’s order does not repeal Section 230, Trump added shortly after: “One of the things we may do … is remove or totally change [Section] 230.”
The executive order came two days after Twitter, for the first time, added warning links to two of Trump’s tweets, inviting readers to “get the facts.” The tweets made a series of claims about state-led mail-in voting services, an issue Trump has railed against in recent weeks.
The labels, when clicked, led Twitter users to a page describing Trump’s claims as “unsubstantiated.”
“Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election.’ However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” Twitter’s fact-checking page said, citing reporting from CNN, The Washington Post and other news outlets.
Trump said Thursday that social media companies selectively choosing who to fact-check is tantamount to “political activism, and it’s inappropriate.”
Twitter on Thursday night called Trump’s executive order “a reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law, saying attempts to erode it “threaten the future of online speech.”
