When Twitter went after Donald Trump and started "fact-checking" and flagging some of his tweets after years of pressure to do that, and more, about the presence of the US president on the platform, he struck back.
By signing the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, Trump accused social networks like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook of expressing clear political. i.e., anti-conservative bias, while at the same time having unprecedented power over the way public events are presented and interpreted.
In order to curb what he sees as misuse of this power, the order aims to limit some legal protections that social platforms enjoy thanks to the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and contained in its Section 230.
The legislation, passed in 1996, treats websites as by and large not legally responsible for third-party content - something that differentiates them from traditional publishers. And although this is not the only provision or protection provided by Section 230, it is this that is most often cited when the law is touted as fundamental for the way the internet has been able to develop over the past 25 years. In short, users have been able to post content, while these networks grew into giants by attracting ever more users, without fear of being inundated and eventually put out of business by lawsuits triggered by that same content.
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