By Todd Spangler
President Donald Trump said he signed an executive order to “defend free speech” from social-media companies by limiting their legal protections from liability — an action he took two days after Twitter applied fact-checking labels to two of his inaccurate tweets about mail-in ballots.
The White House announced Trump’s order seeking to limit legal protections of social-media companies on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The text of the order was subsequently made available at this link.
According to Trump, the executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that would remove the legal liability shield for social networks that “engage in censoring or any political conduct.” The law, as it currently stands, lets companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate content on their services as they see fit, while protecting them from lawsuits over content shared on them.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history, frankly,” Trump said in announcing the executive order, according to video released by the White House.
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