META Meta Platforms Inc

By John D. McKinnon and Rebecca Ballhaus 

WASHINGTON -- An executive order President Trump is expected to sign on Thursday would seek to limit the broad legal protection that federal law currently provides to social-media and other online platforms, according to a draft.

As drafted, the order would make it easier for federal regulators to hold companies such as Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. liable for unfairly curbing users' speech, for example, by suspending their accounts or deleting their posts.

The draft, which has been viewed by The Wall Street Journal, isn't yet finalized and is subject to change, people familiar with the administration's deliberations said. It comes after Twitter on Tuesday moved for the first time to apply a fact-checking notice to tweets by the president on the subject of voter fraud. Mr. Trump in a tweet on Tuesday accused the company of "stifling FREE SPEECH" and vowed to take action.

The executive order would mark the Trump administration's most aggressive effort to take action against social-media companies, something the president has threatened to do for years to counteract what he and many of his supporters see as their systemic bias against conservative political positions.

The order would also likely be challenged in court, experts said, on grounds that it oversteps the government's authority in restricting the platforms' legal protections, which federal courts have interpreted broadly. It also could be challenged on grounds that it violates their First Amendment protections.

The White House declined to comment.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, in a CNBC interview aired Thursday, backed his stance of largely not interfering with politicians' posts on the company's platform.

"I don't think Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "I think that's kind of a dangerous line to get to in terms of deciding what is true and what isn't."

Other tech-industry officials criticized the president's plan. "All Americans should be concerned to find a U.S. president issuing executive orders in response to a company that challenges the veracity of his statements," said Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

Jon Berroya, the interim president of the Internet Association, another industry group, said: "Claims of so-called viewpoint bias rely on isolated anecdotes that are undermined by the fact that politicians and political groups successfully use social media to reach millions of followers every day."

The White House order as drafted would seek to reshape the way federal regulators view Twitter and other social-media companies -- not as hosts of speech but as monopolies that control millions of Americans' daily experiences on their platforms.

"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 order says. "When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power."

The draft order also lays groundwork for treating the platforms as places where individuals' First Amendment rights should be protected, terming them "a 21st-century equivalent of the public square."

The draft order is far-reaching in scope, setting up multiple ways for the government to attack what the administration views as the problem of online censorship.

The most important way is by seeking to scale back the sweeping legal protections that Washington established for online platforms in the 1990s, in the internet's early days. Those protections were created by Congress in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That law gives online companies broad immunity from liability for their users' actions, as well as wide latitude to police content on their sites.

Critics across the political spectrum have argued that the law now provides the tech giants too much power, while the platforms argue that it is essential to the internet's functioning.

In essence, the White House draft order would assert that tech companies should lose their Section 230 protection if they take action to discriminate against users or limit their access to a platform without providing a fair hearing, or in ways that aren't spelled out in the platform's terms of service.

The order would direct the Commerce Department to petition the Federal Communications Commission to set up a rule-making proceeding to clarify the scope of Section 230. A key focus of that proceeding would be to determine when platforms have failed to live up to their obligations to act in "good faith" under the law when they police content.

Some experts say the FCC has no legal authority to enforce Section 230.

Federal regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, also could begin to look into complaints of online bias once the executive order is promulgated. A reporting tool the administration set up earlier collected more than 16,000 complaints in a matter of weeks, the draft order says. The FTC, for example, could begin to take enforcement action against companies that limit users' speech in a manner that isn't fully disclosed in their terms of service, or is contrary to the platforms' public claims, on grounds that that constitutes an unfair or deceptive trade practice.

The Justice Department also would convene a working group of state attorneys general to look into complaints under the order, and federal agencies would be directed to review their advertising contracts with companies that engage in speech censorship.

Trump administration officials have been discussing the executive order in various forms since 2018, as the president grew increasingly frustrated with tech companies, people familiar with the discussions said. In recent weeks, those discussions have picked up again. In mid-May, Mr. Trump tweeted that the "Radical Left" was in "total command & control" of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google and said the administration was "working to remedy this illegal situation."

Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York said in a tweet on Thursday: "If President Trump doesn't like Twitter, he can do everyone a favor and stop tweeting."

Write to John D. McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com and Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 28, 2020 12:20 ET (16:20 GMT)

Grafico Azioni Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Storico
Da Mar 2024 a Apr 2024

Grafico Azioni Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Storico
Da Apr 2023 a Apr 2024