Trump vs. Twitter

“President Donald Trump escalated his war on Twitter and other social media companies Thursday, signing an executive order challenging the lawsuit protections that have served as a bedrock for unfettered speech on the internet…“Trump and his campaign reacted after Twitter added a warning phrase to two Trump tweets that called mail-in ballots ‘fraudulent’ and predicted ‘mail boxes will be robbed.’ Under the tweets, there’s now a link reading ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots’ that guides users to a page with fact checks.” (AP News)

Both sides generally oppose the executive order:

“The government has no place second-guessing such decisions. Speech isn’t always either black or white, to say nothing of red or blue… Do Islamism and white separatism count as ‘political viewpoints,’ in which case muting extremists could be counted as ‘bias’? Could a site be dinged for booting Louis Farrakhan or Alex Jones, the conspiracist who has called the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax? Maybe the courts would be asked to sort it out. The Constitution protects fringe views, but it doesn’t require Twitter or Facebook to disseminate them…

“If conservatives think websites like Twitter and Facebook are hopelessly biased, they’re welcome to delete their accounts. We think Facebook is wiser than Twitter in deciding not to fact-check campaign speech. But as Twitter rolls out more fact checking, people can holler if specious claims by Democrats go oddly untouched, and outcry often works.” (Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal)

“It’s an especially ridiculous overreach coming from a president who supposedly hates regulation. It’s built on anecdotes about bias rather than research. It pretends that the liability shield Congress provided in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enabled Big Tech companies to become global behemoths, rather than feckless antitrust enforcement. And it ignores the fact that the tech giants can survive without Section 230, while the upstarts that would compete with them cannot…

“We all have complaints about how powerful Big Tech has become and how the various companies do and do not enforce their terms of service. But having the government regulate those decisions won’t make them better. It will only force the companies to bend their policies to the whims of whichever administration happens to be in power.” (Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times)