President Donald Trump is constantly threatening tech companies with huge consequences and not following through. That includes social media sites, which he both obsessively uses and relentlessly berates for alleged “anti-Trump bias.” But this week, he went beyond the usual trash talk, issuing an executive order governing how websites can moderate content.
The order follows a feud with Twitter after it fact-checked one of Trump’s tweets, but it’s been brewing since at least 2019 when a social media “bias” rule was rumored but never revealed. An unfinished draft of the order leaked on Wednesday, full of nonsensical demands and pointless blustering, with many dismissing the rule as simply illegal.
But the final order released yesterday is significantly different from that draft — and a good deal more troubling. It’s still a tangle of vaguely coherent bad rules, legally baffling demands, and pure posturing. But it’s easier to see the shape of Trump’s goal: a censorship bill that potentially covers almost any part of the web.
The order includes some concrete (if highly shaky) policy proposals, for example:
Websites of any size should lose all Section 230 protections if they don’t follow their terms of service or provide sufficient notice when removing content
The Attorney General should judge whether any websites receiving advertising money from the government are “problematic vehicles for government speech” because of “viewpoint discrimination”
The Federal Trade Commission should investigate websites for deceptive advertising based on their terms of service
It also includes a lot of vague implications that are never substantiated and may be unintentional:
The Federal Communications Commission can write laws and send them to Congress now
Large social media companies are subject to the same rules as the government
Facebook should host porn
But that only scratches the surface of this ludicrously expansive mess.