I see President Trump is trying to keep the bonds of truth off his arms:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”
Speaking from the Oval Office ahead of signing the order, Trump said the move was to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”
“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States,” he claimed. “They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences.” [CNN]
Because, heavens to betsy, the Republic might fall if he is forced to tell the truth.
So what sort of authority might he have?
The executive order tests the boundaries of the White House’s authority. In a long-shot legal bid, it seeks to curtail the power of large social media platforms by reinterpreting a critical 1996 law that shields websites and tech companies from lawsuits. But legal experts on both the right and the left have raised serious concerns about the proposal. They say it may be unconstitutional because it risks infringing on the First Amendment rights of private companies and because it attempts to circumvent the two other branches of government.
Is Twitter a conveyance of free speech, or the originator?
That’s the superfluous legal issue. The more important societal issue is how to deal with a congenital liar and cheat, who happens to hold arguably the most important elected government post, and has discovered, in Twitter, a fire hose for communicating with the public, compared to the old style pea-shooters, aka newspapers and televisions, that were in use before.
Not that they guaranteed truth, either, but their relatively limited reach and the presence of their gatekeepers (editors) made them more or less dependable; indeed, that “more or less” made for hours of vigorous debate for a couple of hundred years in those parts of the country affluent enough to support competing outlets.
In the Internet era, the fading of the importance of geography has erased questions of affluence; the old outlets have been fading, with a few newspaper exceptions such as The New York Times and WaPo, and the television outlets have seen some renaissance of late as well. But the social media platforms remain dominant, because they effectively have no gatekeepers; their feeble efforts are often mis-aimed (my Facebook account was recently disabled for no given reason, and then re-enabled) and appear to be entirely reactive. An editor at a newspaper gets to read contributions before they’re published; critically untrue at social media platforms.
Because there are no natural boundaries to the gaming field, it becomes the entire world, and it’s zero-sum because it’s not just a publishing platform, but also a communications platform – for nearly anyone. Judging a platform on its truthfulness is nearly useless, as it’s unable to control what is said – but because it’s the carrier and barrier of last resort, it becomes responsible.
So I suppose that’s a lot of blather just to get to my favorite quote coming out of this dustup, from a CNN article yesterday:
David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and former top FTC consumer protection official, said any government push to restrict how private platforms moderate their websites could raise First Amendment questions.
“This is just another example of Trump thinking that the Constitution makes him a king, but it doesn’t,” he said.
