Twitter needs fresh look, not Trump spite

President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting social-media companies raises tough questions about presidential power, presidential bullying and freedom of speech. To understand it, we need to start with what’s clear, and then explore what’s not.
An executive order is not a law. It doesn’t bind the private sector. It doesn’t require Twitter or YouTube to do anything at all. Many executive orders are orders from the president to his subordinates, directing them to do things. That’s what this one is.
With respect to the communications market (of which the social-media companies are an important part), the most important federal agency is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent agency not subject to the president’s policy control. The executive order signed by Trump respects the FCC’s independence. It doesn’t direct the FCC to take action.
Some passages of this executive order read like a fit of pique, or an attempt at punishment. Indeed, the order does not obscure the fact that it is, at least in part, a response to behaviour by Twitter that Trump didn’t like: adding fact-check labels to two misleading presidential tweets about voting by mail. Consider this:
Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets.
It’s appropriate for the president to call for reassessments of national policy. It’s not appropriate for the president to use the authority of his office to punish perceived political enemies.
The order attempts to use the power of the purse to threaten social media companies. It directs all executive agencies to review their spending on advertising and marketing on such platforms — and then directs the Department of Justice “to assess whether any online platforms are problematic vehicles for government speech due to viewpoint discrimination, deception to consumers, or other bad practices.”
In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with that. In context, it looks like an effort to get the companies to act in a way that pleases the president.
The most important provisions of the order involve section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That all-important law states: “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.”
As a result, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others are regarded as platforms, not publishers. If their platform contains defamatory material posted by users, or material that inflicts emotional distress, the platforms themselves cannot be sued (as can, for example, newspapers or television networks when they run defamatory material). There are specified exceptions, as for copyright violations. Section 230 goes on to insulate providers of such services from liability for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

—Bloomberg