Donald Trump’s executive order on social media is less about the policy the order tries to put into place than it is about intimidating social media companies into giving him favorable treatment—and if it was about the actual policy, it might backlash on Trump himself. Trump’s order tries to strip social media companies of some liability protections they currently have for the content posted by their users. Users like Donald Trump.
“Ironically, Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Kate Ruane told The New York Times. “If platforms were not immune under the law, then they would not risk the legal liability that could come with hosting Donald Trump’s lies, defamation and threats.”
Trump’s move against social media companies comes precisely because Twitter appended fact-checks to some of his blatant lies about mail-in voting, but if Twitter or Facebook faced legal liability because of things he posted, like falsely accusing Joe Scarborough of murder, the penalties applied to his tweets might go beyond fact checking.
But again, that’s not the point.
“The issue I have and I think a lot of people are starting to realize is the executive order doesn’t need to be legally enforceable to still be a threat to these companies,” Jeffrey Westling, a technology and innovation policy fellow at R Street Institute, told the Times. “The companies will likely win any challenge, but no one wants to go through litigation. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis of, ‘Is it worth it to put a fact check the next time the president puts a false tweet out there?’”
Trump wants that answer to be no, it’s not worth it. And a well-publicized campaign against social media companies has the side benefit of encouraging his supporters’ victim complex.