order said<\/a>\u00a0the protections against lawsuits should only apply when companies act in \u201cgood faith\u201d to take down or limit the visibility of content.<\/p>\nAny removal or restriction made in a manner that is \u201cdeceptive, pretextual, or inconsistent with a provider\u2019s terms of service\u201d would not qualify as being in good faith, nor would a move without \u201cadequate notice, reasoned explanation, or a meaningful opportunity to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association trade group, called the order \u201cunconstitutional and ill-considered.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerica\u2019s internet companies lead the world and it is incredible that our own political leaders would seek to censor them for political purposes,\u201d Shapiro said in a statement.<\/p>\n
In a tweeted statement, Twitter called the executive order \u201ca reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law,\u201d adding, \u201cattempts to unilaterally erode it threaten the future of online speech and Internet freedoms.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Facebook spokesperson said exposing companies to liability would penalize those that allow controversial speech and \u201cencourage platforms to censor anything that might offend anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
YouTube Chief Executive Officer Susan Wojcicki, in an interview with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg Television while the order was being prepared, said, \u201cwe have worked extraordinarily hard to make sure that all of our policies and systems are built in a fair and neutral and consistent way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Department of Commerce, in consultation with the attorney general, would be responsible for petitioning the Federal Communications Commission within 60 days to craft the new regulation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis debate is an important one,\u201d FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. \u201cThe Federal Communications Commission will carefully review any petition for rulemaking filed by the Department of Commerce.\u201d<\/p>\n
Industry and civil liberties groups who denounced the order as an illegal end-run around free-speech protections and said it gave the FCC powers it does not actually have.<\/p>\n
Twitter has been an essential tool for Trump as both a politician and as president, dating back to his false allegations that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya.<\/p>\n
Trump has observed himself that the social media platform allows him to dodge the press and speak directly to his 80 million followers. It has also afforded him the unfettered opportunity to assail political opponents and to promulgate conspiracy theories and other misinformation.<\/p>\n
Attorney General William Barr, who joined Trump for his remarks, said the order would not repeal Section 230, which provides social-media companies their liability protection.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s been stretched and I don\u2019t know of anyone in Capitol Hill who doesn\u2019t agree that it\u2019s been stretched beyond its original intention,\u201d he said. \u201cI think this will help get back to the right balance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump and Barr also said they were reviewing possibilities to seek legislation further curbing Section 230 protections. Barr said the government may also bring litigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things we may do, Bill, is just remove or totally change 230,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWhat I think we can say is we\u2019re going to regulate it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roth Criticism<\/strong><\/p>\nEarlier Thursday, Trump called out a single Twitter employee, head of site integrity Yoel Roth, in a tweet complaining that the platform\u2019s decision to fact-check his tweets on voting by mail could \u201ctaint\u201d the U.S. election.<\/p>\n
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany criticized Roth for political tweets, including one that said \u201cactual Nazis\u201d inhabit Trump\u2019s White House.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter\u2019s head of site integrity has tweeted that there are quote, \u2018actual Nazis,\u2019 in the White House and no fact-check label was ever applied to this actually outrageous and false claim made against the White House and its employees,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
White House officials complained that Twitter did not originally append fact checks to China Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lijan Zhao, who without evidence wrote that \u201cit might be\u201d the U.S. military that brought the coronavirus to China. Twitter has since added the fact-check link to his tweets.<\/p>\n
Democrats have largely applauded the effort to fact-check the president. But they questioned why Twitter didn\u2019t similarly add links to recent tweets by the president that baselessly accused MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murdering a former staffer who died while at work in one of his congressional offices nearly two decades ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes we like Twitter to put up their fact check of the president, but it seems to be very selective,\u201c House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.<\/p>\n
The executive order is the latest in a years-long campaign by the president and his allies against social media companies.<\/p>\n
The companies say they have more aggressively sought to combat disinformation and foreign interference campaigns after the federal government found that Russia and other state operatives used U.S. social media to influence the 2016 election.<\/p>\n
Bias Allegations<\/strong><\/p>\nRepublicans have alleged that Twitter and Facebook are politically biased in the way they display posts and block certain material deemed offensive, and objected to Twitter\u2019s decision to ban certain political advertising.<\/p>\n
Last May, the administration set up a website asking Americans to submit instances of alleged political bias on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,\u201d Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cPartnering with the biased fake news media \u2018fact checkers\u2019 is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president has complained about Twitter\u2019s efforts to combat manipulative and abusive content by deleting fake profiles — leading to a decline of hundreds of thousands of users in his follower count.<\/p>\n
The websites have denied their actions are politically motivated, and Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said then he also lost around 200,000 followers in the purge. In 2018 congressional testimony, Dorsey said there were technical explanations for cases of alleged bias raised by Republican lawmakers.<\/p>\n
Still, the debate has exposed a rift among Silicon Valley tech giants, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticizing Twitter\u2019s decision in an interview with Fox News.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn\u2019t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,\u201d he said. \u201cPrivate companies probably shouldn\u2019t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn\u2019t be in the position of doing that.\u201c<\/p>\n
Dorsey fired back in a tweet posted Wednesday night, saying the fact-check was designed to make sure people didn\u2019t misunderstand the president\u2019s tweet and believe they didn\u2019t need to register to vote in order to receive an absentee ballot.<\/p>\n
\nRead: Netflix reports massive growth<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to limit liability protections social-media companies enjoy after Twitter began selective fact checks of his posts on the platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":402935,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-402927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402927"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":402941,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402927\/revisions\/402941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}