The executive order Trump could use to take on Twitter and Facebook – Protocol
A draft of an executive order that President Donald Trump may sign as soon as Thursday could dramatically expand the government’s ability to punish social media platforms, marking the Trump administration’s most aggressive salvo yet in its battle against alleged anti-conservative bias on platforms including Twitter and Facebook.
A draft of the expansive executive order, circulated to stakeholders and obtained by Protocol late Wednesday night, would pull multiple levers of governmental power — including federal agencies, the U.S. attorney general and the White House — in order to blast the tech giants over allegations that their platforms censor conservative voices. The executive order comes on the heels of a bitter, days-long fight over Twitter’s decision to fact-check one of Trump’s recent tweets — and five months before the presidential election, signaling that Trump believes it could be a galvanizing issue for his base amid a pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 people in the U.S.
it is fascinating that the draft executive order explicitly calls out each platform's ties to China as justification for taking on Section 230 pic.twitter.com/LVJj9zRnaE
— Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e) May 28, 2020
we got a draft of Trump's social media executive order. here's a rundown:
-empowers FCC to review Section 230
-forwards complaints of anti-conservative bias filed with the White House over to the FTC
-asks federal agencies to pull back digital ad $$
-!https://t.co/NjtHmBAaDG— Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e) May 28, 2020