UPDATE: Trump Set To Announce An executive Order Against Social Media Companies
As we previously reported, Donald Trump threatened to shut down social media platforms just days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading” and flagged them down. It was a first, but Trump is working overtime to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
RELATED: Trump Threatens To Shut Down Social Media Platforms Over ‘Fact Check’ Controversy
According to CNN, President Donald Trump is set to announce an executive order against social media companies this Thursday. It was said that he is preparing to sign one that could destroy legal protections for social media companies for content posted on their platforms. Apparently, the move is to punish online platforms for perceived anti-conservative bias. Business Insider reports that the draft targeting Facebook and Twitter got leaked online.
Kate Klonick, a law professor, reportedly published what she said was a draft of the order late on Wednesday.
“In 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 online,” the draft executive order states. “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.”
The document claims that online platforms have been “flagging content as inappropriate even though it does not violate any stated terms of service, making unannounced and unexplained changes to policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints, and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse.”
It also faults Google for helping the Chinese government surveil its citizens along with Twitter for spreading Chinese propaganda; and Facebook for profiting from Chinese advertising.
As the news site notes, the order would “ask the Federal Communications Commission to examine those regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and to look at whether platforms’ actions to remove or alter users’ content should mean they forgo these protections.” It will also allow state-level prosecutors to sanction companies that in the government’s judgment are not even-handed in their editorial practices.
As the news site notes, the order also lays out several specific policy initiatives that will purportedly promote “free and open debate on the Internet.”Facebook, Google and Twitter have not commented on these latest reports.
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