Enraged by Twitter daring to fact-check some of his lies, Donald Trump is planning an executive order limiting legal protections for social media companies. While the order is still being drafted—because the White House is scrambling to respond to yet another Trump rage-whim—it likely “would make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they move to suspend users or delete posts, among other examples,” The New York Times reports.
“When they move to suspend users or delete posts, among other examples” … like fact-checking Trump’s lies, we can suspect. This is a clear example of both retaliation for what Trump sees as a personal attack and of the longstanding Republican practice of screaming that they’re being discriminated against by the media or social media in order to pressure companies into giving them favorable treatment. It’s not a substantive piece of policy.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg responded to Twitter’s fact-checking by fulfilling his role as a reliable Trump suck-up, telling Fox News “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.” (In case it wasn’t pretty f’ing clear—although, significantly, Facebook does pick and choose when to be the arbiter.)
Trump didn't consult the Federal Communications Commission before announcing his executive order, and the agency has previously pushed back against other Trump plans to regulate social media to his liking.
The new executive order, whatever it ends up saying in its final form, is likely to spur a court battle, and it shouldn’t hold up in court. “It’s unclear what to make of this because to a certain extent, you can’t just issue an executive order and overturn on a whim 25 years of judicial precedent about how a law is interpreted,” Kate Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John’s University, told The New York Times.
“This is just another example of Trump thinking that the Constitution makes him a king, but it doesn't,” Donald Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and former Federal Trade Commission official, told CNN. There are two big questions, though. One is how many of the judges he’s appointed will be signing on to the Trump-as-king theory of the Constitution. The other is whether it will matter once the social media companies rush to do whatever it takes to make Trump happy between now and the elections.