President Trump has signed a decree that requires the U.S. government to investigate whether new media can be imposed on social media companies. According to Trump, companies like Twitter and Facebook should be held responsible for the editorial choices they make.
Social media companies are not responsible for the content on their platforms under United States Internet Law of 1996. This is because they are not seen as publishers of that content, but only as a stage. Trump wants that passage out of the law. The decree is a first step, the president wants to come up with a bill later.
Trump currently has it on the stick with Twitter. The platform posted a warning about its recent tweets about postal voting. According to the president, voting by mail leads to fraud, according to Twitter that is factually incorrect.
Twitter conducts political activism
“What Twitter is fact-checking and ignoring is political activism. And that’s inappropriate,” he said when the decree was signed.
The Trump administration previously considered issuing such a decree. That has not happened so far, because the government feared that it would not be legally feasible. It would also go against conservative principles such as freedom of expression. And that is an important part of this issue, says correspondent Marieke de Vries News hour.
“Trump can invoke freedom of expression, but a private company like Twitter can too. They have the right to comment on messages and also to criticize the President of the United States.”
Fear of regulation
It is still unclear how far the legislation will go. Tech companies fear that the decree will lead to stricter legislation for social media and other parts of the internet.
Accordingly, legal experts expect tech companies to go to court to challenge the decree, they say The Washington Post. “It is interesting to see who will be proven right if it later comes to a lawsuit,” says De Vries.
“Let people judge for themselves”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday evening that the platform will continue to disclaim disclaimers for misleading election information. “That doesn’t make us an arbitrator as to the truth. We want to be able to show the opposite information so that people can judge for themselves.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also responded to the decree. He said that social media should not act as arbitrators of the truth.
Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, hopes Twitter will continue to fact-check information. She says that much more needs to be done to ensure that fact checks are used fairly across all platforms.
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