President Donald Trump has signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, May 28, a few days after Twitter flagged two of his tweets as “potentially misleading.”
The executive order, titled “ Preventing Online Censorship ” focuses on how free speech is the essence of American democracy and the freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation of all rights that are exercised by free people.
It further delves into how the country cannot allow a few online platforms to selectively pick the speech that can be accessed, propagated and conveyed by the people of America.
Calling this practice as “un-American and anti-democratic,” the executive order further says that social media companies have the right to censor the opinion that they do not agree, which is a dangerous power.
The new executive order targeting social media company focuses on a law called the Communications Decency Act. Section 23 of the legislation. This legislative law has protected social media companies and websites that create and moderate their content against lawsuits.
The order states that the legislation was largely intended to protect tech companies that are operating in good faith. However, Trump believes that social media companies have not been operating in the desired way for them to be protected against lawsuits.
Trump’s signing of the executive order proposed the introduction of new regulations in Section 23 of the legislation,. According to which social media companies will no longer receive the immunity that has been getting for engaging in censoring any political conduct.
“The Five” co-host Marie Harf believes that what Trump is doing is grievance politics and his action is not a legal one, but political.
“The real question for Twitter," Harf said, "is whether they are comfortable with their platform being used by anyone -- including the president -- to promote hateful, violent, dangerous or outright fabrications to millions of people and that’s a really hard question."
Harf believes that the move made by Trump is just an effort to troll Twitter since they marked two of his tweets with a “misleading” warning label.
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