White House confirms Trump will sign executive order on social media companies today

[contentcards url=”https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/white-house-confirms-trump-will-sign-executive-order-on-social-media-companies-today” target=”_blank”]

Trump had warned social media giants that his administration could ‘strongly regulate, or close them down’ before promising ‘big action.’

Thu May 28, 2020 – 8:33 am EST

UNITED STATES, May 28, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. president Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order regarding social media companies today, after strongly criticizing anti-conservative bias on Twitter in the past 24 hours.Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason tweeted yesterday that the White House has confirmed that the order will be signed today, after press secretary Kayleigh McEnany informed reporters of the plans on board Air Force One.https://twitter.com/jeffmason1/status/1265771880100835339?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1265771880100835339%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lifesitenews.com%2Fnews%2Fwhite-house-confirms-trump-will-sign-executive-order-on-social-media-companies-today

The news follows a series of tweets by Trump attacking the anti-conservative bias of Twitter, after the social media platform posted a “get the facts” label on his recent tweets warning of the likelihood of voting fraud through mail-in ballots.

Last year, Twitter locked LifeSiteNews’s account for accurately identifying the male sex of Jonathan Yaniv, a Canadian activist who presents himself as a woman.

In the past 24 hours, Trump has accused Twitter of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and social media platforms generally of silencing conservative voices. He warned social media giants that his administration could “strongly regulate, or close them down” before promising “big action” later in the day.

.@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election. If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen! They tried hard in 2016, and lost. Now they are going absolutely CRAZY. Stay Tuned!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2020

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz announced on his regular podcast yesterday that he is working on legislation that would remove the legal immunity that social media companies currently enjoy, because the law classes them as platforms rather than publishers.

“I am currently working with my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee to craft legislation to say that if you’re going to opine as to the truth or falsity of that which is put on your platform, for the sake of its viewers, you don’t get the protection of Section 230. You are not a platform. You are doing something else, you are editorializing,” Gaetz said.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms like Twitter and Facebook from being sued for what their users post on the sites. Whereas news agencies and other publishers can face lawsuits for publishing libelous claims, social media platforms are currently exempt from such action.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the controversy surrounding Twitter’s fact-checking of Trump by saying he believes that Facebook and other private platform companies “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.” Zuckerberg told Fox News that Facebook has a different policy on fact-checking from Twitter’s.

Last week, Facebook punished conservative education organization PragerU with “reduced distribution and other restrictions” for “repeated sharing of false news” and “misinformation” when PragerU released a video disputing environmentalists’ claims about the decline of polar bear populations. The social media giant suppressed a quotation from St. Augustine last year, and in 2018, a Facebook spokeswoman admitted to suppressing and demonetizing posts deemed “false” by “our third-party fact-checkers.”

“ORIGINAL CONTENT LINK”

Read more Trump news