President Trump has claimed for months that Silicon Valley giants are biased against conservatives, threatening antitrust investigations and fuming that his Twitter following would otherwise be well above 62 million.
The grudges didn’t stop him, however, from buying Facebook ads for his campaign or suggesting that social media companies team with his administration to help prevent mass shootings.
The moves have sent conflicting signals to some of America’s best-known and most valuable companies, including Google, leaving them unsure what to expect.
The administration’s proposal of working with social media “just seems disingenuous, given how the president has treated the tech companies in recent months,” said Clint Watts, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and former FBI special agent. “He had a social media summit and he didn’t invite them, he’s battled them on claims of bias without evidence.
Speaking from the White House after back-to-back attacks in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that left dozens dead, the president issued a call to “shine light on the dark recesses of the Internet” and directed the Justice Department to work with all levels of government and social media companies “to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”
The president didn’t detail what those tools may look like, but the White House on Friday convened a meeting with tech giants to further discuss how algorithms can be used to scour posts on social media and identify possible shooters before they attack.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said after the meeting the White House is urging online companies “to continue their efforts in addressing violent extremism and helping individuals at risk, and to do so without compromising free speech.”
Trump’s request came on the heels of a solicitation from the FBI for “the services of a company to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests through a means of online sources.” The “mission-critical exploitation of social media will enable the bureau to detect disrupt, and investigate an ever-growing diverse range of threats to U.S. national interests,” the FBI said in its request.
Facebook already uses artificial intelligence and human moderators to identify and remove harmful content, while Twitter employs technology to flag accounts that post abusive content, efforts that spurred claims by Trump and his supporters that firms are using such capabilities to silence Republicans.
The president has also accused Twitter of surreptitiously reducing the number of his followers. His White House has solicited bias complaints from consumers, and the president vowed during a recent social media summit with conservative activists to “explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech.”
His battle may be nearing a tipping point.
The White House, according to CNN, crafted a draft executive order that would task the Federal Communications Commission with clarifying whether social media platforms are shielded from legal liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act when they take down or suppress content.
The law protects platforms from lawsuits over objectionable content that is removed, and organizations that oppose changes to Section 230 warn doing so could force companies to host harmful content for fear of infringing upon free speech rights.
Under Section 230, passed in the mid-1990s, Internet platforms are protected from lawsuits over content posted by their users. While the Trump proposal — which might limit the freedom tech companies have in handling the posts on their platforms — has not yet been unveiled and could still be changed, experts believe it is unconstitutional.
Aaron Mackey, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the president lacks the legal authority to “order independent federal agencies to police speech on the Internet, or to rewrite Section 230.
“The First Amendment would bar rules conscripting federal agencies into enforcing purported political neutrality,” he said. “The prospect of the government deputizing itself to enforce Internet censorship should be deeply troubling and concerning to anyone who cares about the Constitution and preserving the Internet as a place where everyone can gather, innovate, and participate in the democratic process.”
Trump’s conflicting actions toward tech companies leave them with an uncertain playing field, said Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University.
“They definitely are in a difficult position, there’s no doubt about it, and if the president is pushing certain kinds of conspiracy theories about the tech companies, that doesn’t make the situation any easier,” he said.
Despite Trump’s broadsides against Silicon Valley, Simi contended platforms still have a responsibility to root out extremist and violent content that has proliferated on the sites.
“These are their platforms,” he said. “They have to be held responsible for the content.”
