Trump signs order targeting social media giants’ legal protections
…via PressTV, Tehran
[ Editor’s Note: Gosh, can you believe this? Trump has been waking up in the morning to start bashing whomever he wants on Twitter, making charges over and over with no supporting evidence, as he has Presidential immunity.
But he wants anyone else doing this on Twitter, to be punished if “guess who” does not like the content. This has a whiff of a mobster type attitude to me. Our Pretender-in-Chief seems to fear his claims might not stand up to muster on the Twitter battlefield, so he wants to stack the deck against detractor free speech.
How long must we watch Trump issue executive orders to essentially negate constitutional rights by signing his name on a piece of paper? He did take an oath to defend the Constitution.
Is there a silver lining here, that the crazier he gets and acts the more independent voters he will lose in November, as those folks could hold the key to saving us from four more years of the gangster in the White House?
We could also get to see how tough he is without his Presidential immunity. I have always felt that, at the end of the day, Trump would play the key role in bringing himself down.
He is desperate to win in November so the five year statutes of limitation will run out on a number of his legal cases. For a man who has everything to lose from his house of cards empire crumbling down around him, I fear there is nothing he would not do to avoid that, no matter how horrible or illegal that could be… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … May 28, 2020 –
President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday seeking to strip social media giants like Twitter of legal immunity for content posted by users.
If this was enacted, the likes of Twitter and Facebook would become open to lawsuits and greatly increased government regulation.
Trump — angered this week after Twitter tagged one of his tweets for the first time with a fact-check notice — said regulation was needed because the companies are no longer neutral forums but engaging in “political activism.”
According to Trump, such platforms have “unchecked power to censor, restrict… virtually any form of communication between private citizens.”
“We can’t let that happen,” he said, “especially when they go about doing what they’re doing because they’re doing things incorrectly, they have points of view.”
For the first time, Twitter has flagged some of US President Donald Trump’s tweets with a fact-check warning.
The president’s ire appeared especially focused on fact-checking services that big social media platforms have added in an effort to weed out rampant disinformation and so-called “fake news.”
This, he said, made the companies into traditional publishers, therefore liable for whatever material they host.
“The choices that Twitter makes when it chooses to suppress… editorial decisions pure and simple,” he said.
“In those moments, Twitter ceases to be a neutral public platform and they become an editor with a viewpoint and I think we can say that about others also, whether you’re looking at Google, whether you’re looking at Facebook, perhaps others.”
According to Trump, his executive order aims to “uphold the free speech and rights of the American people.”
However, before this could go into effect it will face strong political opposition and Trump conceded it would get challenged in court.
Opponents say Trump’s aim is to tame the same social media platforms on which he is easily the biggest political presence in the country, cowing their attempts to reduce misinformation.
While Trump complains that social media leaders are liberal-leaning, he enjoys an overwhelming presence on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and other outlets for his streams of often factually incorrect posts and crude insults against opponents.
Asked why he wouldn’t just walk away from Twitter, where he has 80 million followers, Trump said he would, except that he relies on the platform to bypass the traditional media, which he complained is unfair.
“There’s so much fake news, it’s disgraceful,” he told the journalists covering him in the Oval Office.
Trump even mused about his desire to see Twitter disappear altogether — if he had any way to make this happen.
“If it were able to be legally shut down, I’d do it,” he said.
(Source: AFP)
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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