President Signs Executive Order Protecting Free Speech on Social Media: ‘Behemoths who control,’ AG Barr says will go further if necessary

By Pamela Geller - on May 29, 2020

It took years, but finally we have a President who is taking action.

NYP: President Trump signed an executive order that aims to curtail their legal liability protections – two days after Twitter slapped fact check labels to a pair of his tweets about fraud in mail-in voting for the first time.

“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers it has faced in American history,” Trump said before signing the executive order in the Oval Office where Attorney General Bill Barr was present.

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“A small handful of powerful social media monopolies,” Trump said, “had unchecked power to censure, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”

Trump declared, “We can’t let this continue to happen, it’s very, very unfair.”

The president added, “This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation. Social media companies have vastly more power in the United States than newspapers, they’re by far more rich than any other traditional forms of communication.”

Social media companies “that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,” Trump vowed, adding that companies “like Twitter enjoy an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform — which they are not.”

“My executive order further instructed the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices,” said the commander in chief who at one point held up a copy of Thursday’s NY Post featuring a lead member of Twitter’s policing team who once called the president a “racist tangerine.”

Trump’s order directs federal agencies to look at whether they can place new regulations on the tech giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube.

“There’s no precedent in American history for so small a number of corporations to control so large a sphere of human interaction,” said Trump who claimed that Twitter is making “editorial decisions.”

“As president, I’m not allowing the American people to be bullied by these giant corporations. Many people have wanted this to be done by presidents for a long time,” he said, adding, “I’ve been called by Democrats that want to do this and so I think you could possibly have a bipartisan situation.”

The order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 landmark federal law that largely exempts online platforms from legal liability for material posted by their users, allowing them to be treated more like publishers.

This is exactly the legal case we made against our 2016 lawsuit against social media giants.

https://www.facebook.com/dan.bongino/videos/241288773830814/

‘Behemoths who control’: Barr says Trump executive order on social media companies will go further if necessary

By Mica Soellner| May 28, 2020 :

Attorney General William Barr praised President Trump for his executive order that could allow federal regulators to take punitive action against social media giants for the way they regulate online content.

Trump’s order rolls back the long-standing legal protection known as Section 230, which spares tech companies from being held liable for the content they allow online and how they decide to monitor it.

Barr said the protection, which was adopted about 25 years ago, has been stretched beyond its original intention of not holding tech companies accountable for the content created by third-party users.

“It’s been completely stretched to allow what have become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material,” Barr said.
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“So when they put on their own content, like fact-check content onto other people’s content and when curate their collection, they start censoring particular content, including in many cases the direction of … governments like communist China, they become publishers. They shouldn’t be entitled to the same kind of shield that was set up earlier,” he continued.

The order comes days after Twitter put a fact-check alert on one of Trump’s tweets, linking mail-in voting to increased voter fraud.

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Ban Islam

3 years ago

That’s awesome news and it’s about time. Makes you wonder if Trump or his closest allies are secret readers of Pam’s site, wouldn’t that be amazing? We’ve been railing about this for years so it is a bit surprising that Trump understands exactly what we’re talking and will finally take action.

Twitter pushed their luck too far, esp when they went after Trump, they did it to themselves. Trump also needs to investigate foreign influence by Saudi Arabia and other countries who own parts of these companies and are censoring opinions that are anti-Islamic or anti-migrant for example.

He’s opened a huge can of worms, there is a lot of work to be done to make these organizations truly public spaces but for freedom-lovers, this is a huge turning point so long as he follows through. They also need to reverse bans for those of us who were silenced because we oppose Islam. We should be compensated as well. Would be nice if many of the top executives saw jail-time but it might be asking for too much.

felix1999

3 years ago

Reply to Ban Islam

Trump has known this for a long time. He was hoping to make this happen through legislation but the swamp doesn’t seem to see a need for it. Trump doesn’t get much cooperation or back up from them.

Ban Islam

3 years ago

Reply to felix1999

Yes he probably did and I posted about this a short while ago that Congress couldn’t be trusted to do this, it’d take executive action and I’m very elated that’s exactly what Trump has done.

As Orwell said ‘in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ That’s what Trump is for us, that revolution against tyranny coming from the Left. I’m going to get my popcorn ready, to watch Liberal heads explode over Trump’s “power grab” or however they’ll frame it.

Ofc Trump can’t do it alone, he’ll need to create a department that will watch the watchers and make sure they allow real freedom of speech and go after those who fail to comply.

Safeguarding free speech is extremely important but there is another major form of tyranny that has been largely ignored for a very long time, the elephant in the room, which ofc is Islam. I hope Trump signs an executive order to study it’s infiltration in the West and then work to remove or eliminate it and include deportation and warfare when needed.

TomSJr

3 years ago

Reply to Ban Islam

Congress, the House of Liberals, will only take action AGAINST CONSERVATIVE AMERICA.

Bill Kay

3 years ago

Reply to Ban Islam

Couldn’t agree more finally we are moving in the right direction finally we have a leader with true SPINE to do the correct thing and hopefully he will start on that elephant your talking about couldn’t happen soon enough your post was brilliant .

Patti York

3 years ago

Let the lawsuits begin.

felix1999

3 years ago

Reply to Patti York

Loosening this up must be extended to the print media as well. That would help get the liberal msm inline and stop the liberal media from printing lies. Defamation libel and slander thrive in the liberal print media.

felix1999

3 years ago

Barr, GROW A SET and bring the hammer down NOW!
Now is the time to end it. Stop it with the hot air threats you are becoming famous for.
An EXECUTIVE ORDER Is easily REVERSED by the next President!
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