President Trump is expected to order a review of the federal law that protects social media companies from content posted by their users days after Twitter labeled two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”
Trump is scheduled to sign the executive order on Thursday.
A draft of the executive order seeks to limit the legal protections shielding internet companies and websites such as Twitter and Facebook from lawsuits, making it easier for federal agencies to hold the companies liable.
Trump accused Twitter of “stifling FREE SPEECH” and said he would take action after a fact-check prompt appeared under his tweet that alleged fraud in mail-in voting.
The order, which is not yet finalized and is subject to change, would mark the Trump administration’s strongest action yet against the social media companies that he has previously slammed for bias against conservatives.
Earlier this month, Trump said that the “Radical Left” had “control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google” and called it “illegal.”
The draft text calls for clarifying Section 230 of the Federal Communications Act, a law that shields internet companies from culpability for users’ offensive or illegal content. Trump’s call to eliminate these protections was previously proposed by Democrats.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said on Thursday that any move against Twitter or other social media companies would likely require congressional action.
“As a private actor, Twitter is not the subject of the First Amendment but the President and his administration are,” Turley wrote on Twitter. “There are also separation of powers concerns with any unilateral or constructive amendment of Section 230.”
The order also requires the U.S attorney general to create a working group with states’ attorneys general to collect public information on “the monitoring or creating watch-lists of users based on their interactions with content or users … and monitoring users based on their activity off the platform.”
According to the draft, a “Tech Bias Reporting” tool created by the White House Office of Digital Strategy received more than 16,000 complaints.
The order further states that companies have acquiesced to the rules of foreign governments, such as China’s, while “invoking inconsistent, irrational, and groundless justifications to censor or otherwise punish Americans’ speech here at home.”
Tech giant Google, the order said, “created a search engine for the Chinese Communist Party, which blacklisted searches for ‘human rights,’ hid data unfavorable to the Chinese Communist Party, and tracked users determined appropriate for surveillance.”
