After Trump threw a tantrum over Twitter doing the bare-minimum to fact-check his deliberately misleading tweets, Trump announced plans to sign an Executive Order that forces social media to "protect" "free speech." Because government-approved top-down authoritarian control of private companies is apparently now a central tenet of the Republican Party.
Content Moderation expert Kate Klonick shared a draft of the order.
Section 230 doesn't protect editorial conductTwitters labels on tweets regarding falsity = editorial conduct
Therefore, this EO places such platforms outside scope of Sec. 230 protection2/
— Kate Klonick (@Klonick) May 28, 2020
This is all in the name of the commitment and concern for free and diverse speech online.
"So say we all."
(that last bit was me)
4/4
— Kate Klonick (@Klonick) May 28, 2020
You can read the full document here, which hinges on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (as well as the continued wolf-crying fantasy of "conservative censorship"). If you want the sparknotes, Vice has a pretty comprehensive breakdown:
Read the restAs far as legislation goes, the first subsection of 230 is concise and powerful: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
In the order, Trump also makes the argument that social media companies' actions should not "infringe on protected speech," which would be a massive change from Section 230 as it's currently worded, which makes an explicit carve-out for restricting protected speech. This will, unequivocally, change the internet as a whole and make it worse.
