Trump is right that free speech is in danger. But he won't admit the danger is him.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers,” President Trump said on Thursday as he signed an executive order designed to punish social media sites for exercising free speech. To honestly identify the danger to free speech, he would have had to include a mirror in the signing ceremony.
The White House has been plotting its assault on Internet platforms for some time now, and the directive marks the first shot formally fired. It comes as a response to Twitter applying a fact-checking label to tweets from the commander in chief that falsely suggested that vote-by-mail is systemically fraudulent. Twitter early Friday rallied rather than retreating, slapping a warning on a presidential tweet for glorifying violence. The tweet from the president, and then from the official White House account, called protesters in Minneapolis “THUGS” and declared that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The order signed on Thursday is a grab-bag of grievances with remedies that are at best illogical and at worst illegal. Certainly the declaration is a terrible abuse of authority. The White House wants federal regulators to write new rules “clarifying” a landmark law regarding Internet speech, and to discipline companies that allegedly display political bias or otherwise engage in censorship. The Justice Department is also tasked with reviewing agencies’ advertising spending to yank dollars away from sites deemed “problematic.” Finally, the proclamation tells the attorney general to develop a proposal for legislation to promote the order’s policy objectives.
This last instruction suggests a glimmer of understanding that the preceding commands run afoul of the law. The order is a backward interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which wasn’t written to prevent platforms from exercising an editorial role. Just the opposite: Section 230 was written to allow platforms to exercise such a role without exposing themselves to legal liability for posts by third parties. Mr. Trump acts as if he seeks an interpretation of the rule when actually he seeks an invalidation. That’s not his role, but Congress’s — and so far Congress has largely chosen to leave Section 230 alone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-right-that-free-speech-is-in-danger-but-he-wont-admit-the-danger-is-him/2020/05/29/ee0c830a-a1c6-11ea-81bb-c2f70f01034b_story.html
