Trump launches his salvo against social media — will it land?

President Donald Trump's attempt to punish companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook for alleged anti-conservative bias takes aim at the online industry's most-cherished legal protections — but the shot could ultimately be a glancing blow.

Trump announced the action Thursday, signing an executive order that he said would “defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers" — tech platforms that have amassed "unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences."

“We can't allow that to happen,” Trump said in the Oval Office, where he was accompanied by Attorney General William Barr.

Under the order, Trump said he is asking regulators to reinterpret a law that shields internet companies from lawsuits over content on their sites, a safeguard that has allowed Silicon Valley’s giants to generate some of the world’s biggest fortunes.

"My executive order calls for new regulations ... to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield," he said,

But any such action depends on independent agencies and state attorneys general agreeing with the administration’s stance, and would certainly provoke a legal fight that would last long past November’s election.