A draft of the proposed now signed order has been leaked (see also: Business Insider, CNN). Apparently some version of this was floated a year ago and dropped after pushback from the FCC.

It's not actually certain that a final version will be the same as the leaked draft, but this seems to be the relevant section:

And here is what FCC is supposed to do about it:

Updates:

Apparently the order has been issued. I'm not sure if there were any changes to the text but the reporting sounds like it's basically the same.

Official text here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/president...ne-censorship/ (see also this post)

Speaking from some experience, I don't think it's really possible to implement the "taken in good faith" criterion described in any reasonably objective way. Obviously the immediate problem is just that what Trump really wants is a federal bureaucracy that will punish his enemies and reward his friends on whatever flimsy pretext works, but even in a benign administration the actual administration of this policy seems pretty Orwellian, compared to the existing, more sweeping, interpretation of the law.

When I contemplate how this would actually work in practice, I am reminded of this interview with Ken White (@popehat), about the idea of carving out exceptions to speech rights intended to curb hateful speech (sort of the opposite of what Trump wants, but the principle seems right from both directions):

This EO is basically another example of @popehat's counter-argument.

(Re:Is it time to revisit the concept of freedom of speech?)

Well that will be if liberals refuse to do it and leave it to the likes of trump.

The evidence from liberal democracies that do have hate speech laws is that it does not follow this pattern.

I was surprised twitter picked that tweet and than to fact check it used CNN article. If anything you think they would pick the dead woman one were Trumps trying to blame Joe

They are a private company I have no clue how anything he signs will even work

So what’s the evidence? I’m curious

Sites aren't censoring conservative speech, they are censoring potentially dangerous misinformation. And it just so happens that at this point in history, the conservative movement is full of just that. Now, if this is a right thing to do, is another debate.

Regardless, it is pretty clear the executive order comes around because the president lied about elections and got flagged on twitter. The responsible thing to do would be to stop lying, not hide your personal vendetta behind executive orders.

An interesting debate on the topic at large (at least in my head) is the difference between individual free speech and amplifying your speech. For example, if using bot networks, brigading and troll farms is the digital equivalent of installing loudspeakers all over a neighborhood and blasting your neighbors 24-7.

Interesting idea.

I remember reading Lawrence Lessig's book Code, which includes a really interesting discussion on the history of interpretation of the 4th amendment's protections against "unreasonable search and seizure." Specifically, he talks about the idea that new technologies reveal "latent ambiguities" in the text, e.g. in the debate in the 60s about whether or not the 4th amendment should apply to phone wiretaps.

It definitely seems to me that you can argue that the internet and new communications technologies create problems that weren't easily foreseen by the first amendment, in somewhat similar ways. But I'm still not really sure what the best way of approaching that problem.

the platform vs publisher thing has been a meme for bad legal takes for a few years.

i have not read the full order yet, but going from what WN posted i don't see how tagging a post "potentially misleading" is editing, censoring, or in "bad faith" so i dont know what this would even accomplish.

also twitter should obviously just remove trumps account if they had any stones. but i do think that Trump attacking the tech giants in an election year is probably going to be great fundraising for the dems.

I think Trump is actually correct if you go by the intent of the law.

It's up to Twitter to change it's tos to not allow political campaigning or something to that effect.

Just say if you're in office or running for office you can't use the platform. We'd all be better off.

to get all lawbros will save us, the original act was designed to protect sites from defamation type civil lawsuits, and the truth is an absolute defense to those so twitter would have no fear in correcting false claims from defamation suits other than having to deal with trump and co filing the the initial suit in an non anti-slapp state before its inevitably thrown out for being baseless.

section 3 is about prohibiting government agencies from spending money on advertising on social media that violates his policy. so the Military would have to stop advertising on social media which would be a HUGE WIN in my book.

section 4 of the EO appears to be nonsense about attempting to force private companies to adhere to the first amendment.
-- and then goes on to say that there will be an office set up to monitor and create watch lists of users based on their interactions on the platform and monitor other activity..

Twitter is basically a nightmare. Whenever facebook first came about I resisted it at first because I'm like that, but eventually succumbed and still have it because of messenger/facebook marketplace.
And then twitter came along shortly after and the way it was promoted by the media made it pretty clear that it wasn't going to be doing anyone any good--all of a sudden twitter went from being nothing to being talked about constantly. And stuff like that doesn't happen by accident. It's basically reduced discourse to the lowest common denominator and that would seem to be the intention. And I highly doubt that any executive order will be fixing it.

I disagree when the Covington thing went down. The left got a way with a ton including Doxing and threats to the kid. Lets face it one of the reasons Rogan left Youtube was their bias and restrictions. They are private businesses and have that right

The problem Lessig describes is inherent to constitutional law. And it is one of the main arguments for why strict textualism is a wrong-headed approach to constitutional law.

Here it is:

It seems pretty clear this doesn't really do anything. It's very clearly not against the law for platforms to censor as much or as little as they want, so this seems entirely symbolic.

I snipped (c), about investigating "deceptive practices," but it seems like it's similarly implausible that it could actually do anything.

Of course I kind of doubt anything in this order (or any final version) really goes anywhere, but it seems like only the first section really even tries to get off the ground. Section 4 is just "lets collect a bunch of complaints and go through the motions of writing a report about them."

You're pretending that words have meaning in a world where the administration gets away with arguing that "shall" doesn't mean "shall" and that the emoluments clause is not being violated. The only question worth asking is if Mitch McConnell will vote to impeach if Trump ****s with Twitter.

I sort of agree with the argument that the largest social media platforms are de facto public forums, at least roughly. And I've even pondered before whether or not it would be reasonable to have more regulation (leaving aside the legal impediments). I think the CloudFlare blog made an interesting argument, back in 2017, that due process is perhaps as important as speech protections. I think there are at least interesting arguments there.

But obviously it can't be done by executive order, and then it's like who do I trust less to be responsible for this?

I'm guessing that this means Trump's internal polling is showing that he will lose. Why else would he start a fight with his best medium?

What is the play you ask? To created competing social media platforms for Conservatives after he leaves office, utilizing the Trump brand.

I'm not making any assumptions about the executive branch acting properly, but I think there's an important difference between the emoluments/tax documents stuff and what would happen with this EO.

The difference is basically: what happens when there's gridlock between branches? Basically: nothing. In the emoluments case, it means Trump doesn't hand over documents because no one forces him to do so.

In a similar way, the status quo here is that online platforms keep operating under the law as it exists, because no one will compel them to do otherwise. I don't think the FBI is going to like raid Twitter HQ after losing a court case, or something. Maybe by Trump's third term :P

to do this he would need to leave twitter on his own WHILE still president in order to really gain some ground on a new platform, and he doesn't have that in him. who gives a **** where the EXpresident posts his dementia rants, what matters is where trump posts his sundowner rants right now.

Twitter’s fact check policy only relates to specific election centric twits. That is why only election fraud tweets got fact checked and not his other thousands of lies.

It is a stupid limit by twitter to pretend they were doing something. They will likely buckle to the weeping tears of republican snowflakes. Facebook and Zuckerberg are just straight up evil and do not give two ****s.

Slighted, you are grossly underestimating the Trump brand with 25% of the country.

He can do whatever he wants and will immediately gain traction. Network, social media platform, newsmagazines, maybe all of the above.

Facebook is the worst major internet company by a massive margin. Color me surprised that you use it regularly.

From what I have read, the precedent for these sites being public squares is not there. In fact the precedent opposes this concept.

this is quite a reach lol

The notion that if Trump wants to **** with Twitter, nothing will happen seems naive

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...nline-retailer