The Trump administration is putting the final touches on a sweeping executive order designed to punish online platforms for perceived anti-conservative bias. Legal scholar Kate Klonick obtained a draft of the document and posted it online late Wednesday night.
“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online,” the draft executive order states. “This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.”
The document claims that online platforms have been “flagging content as inappropriate even though it does not violate any stated terms of service, making unannounced and unexplained changes to policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints, and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse.”
The order then lays out several specific policy initiatives that will purportedly promote “free and open debate on the Internet.”
Trump could ask the FCC to clarify Section 230
First up is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law gives online service providers like Google, Facebook, and Twitter broad immunity from liability for content posted by users. These protections are available to anyone who runs a website—from YouTube and Facebook to a personal blog with a comment section. But in recent years, a number of Republican politicians have started referring to Section 230 as a special privilege granted to big technology platforms.
Trump’s draft executive order would ask the Federal Communications Commission to clarify Section 230—specifically a provision shielding companies from liability when they remove objectionable content. The provision requires that takedowns be made “in good faith,” and the Trump administration wants the FCC to clarify situations in which takedowns are not made in good faith but are instead “deceptive, pretextual, or inconsistent with a provider’s terms of service” or those undertaken with inadequate notice, explanation, or opportunity for appeal.