Trump’s order to protect freedom on social media may have the opposite effect

Linas Kojala, a political scientist and director of the Center for Eastern European Studies (RESC), said the discussion on social media has been going on for some time and is controversial. According to him, D. Trump’s decision to at least start discussions on how the specific legal acts that regulate social networks could be modified could have both positive and negative consequences.

“The report will say that it defends the possibility of expressing itself on social networks without obstacles and without political restrictions, believing that those restrictions may arise because social networks are located in liberal spaces such as Silicon Valley.”

Social media would reduce the fact that if we try to regulate content itself more strictly, then social media will start to regulate it, actually restricting freedom of expression even further. Both sides will probably say that they are defending freedom of expression. And where the true truth will be will depend on very specific circumstances, “said L. Kojala 15 minutes.

The executive order asks government regulators to assess whether online platforms should be subject to consumer content liability protection if they edit that content, for example by adding a warning.

The order also establishes that immunity should not be granted in case of deletion of records for reasons other than those specified in the terms and conditions of network use.

Implementation of this ordinance would fundamentally change a decade-long precedent and treat online platforms as “publishers” potentially responsible for user-generated content, AFP writes.

Trump’s order will not prohibit online platforms from moderating content, but they could be affected by a wave of lawsuits, as anyone who claims to have suffered as a result of the content posted online will be able to go to court.

Will it have the opposite effect?

Others believe that such an ordinance, which will change the status of social media platforms to “publishers,” would have the opposite effect of D. Trump’s plans.

Matt Schruers, head of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, told the Associated Press: “The irony is that if security goes down, social media services will moderate content and close accounts much more aggressively. Our vibrant discussion area will simply be prearranged audio clips. “

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday that social media censorship would not be a “correct reflection” for a government concerned with censorship.

“I firmly believe that Facebook should not be the judge of everything that people say online,” said Zuckerberg.

“I don’t think private companies in general, business platforms in particular, should do that,” he added.

Matthew Feeney, head of the Cato Institute Conservative Research Center, warned that Trump’s order to deprive him of social media protection could have unintended consequences.

“In the long run, the conservative campaign against social media companies could have a very detrimental effect on freedom of expression,” Feeney told the BBC.

And by changing the Communications Code of Conduct to “impose political neutrality on social media companies,” the platforms could be inundated with “legal content that they would otherwise remove,” such as pornography, violent imagery, and racism.

“Or they would verify the content in such a way as to kill the free flow of information on the social networks that we are used to today,” Feeney said.

He said the draft order was “messy” but could become politically popular before the presidential election.

Because right now?

According to L. Kojala, such a decision by D. Trump has matured: M. Zuckerberg has repeatedly testified in Congress, the European Parliament (EP) and elsewhere in discussing how social media could prevent disinformation campaigns. They received special attention after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, when Russia used social media to try to influence.

“We just realized that the November vote was approaching. But perhaps the latest drop in Trump’s Patience Cup was Twitter’s decision to point out that some of the president’s records should be examined from an objective perspective. it has become an impetus for a step that has matured and in one way or another has been expected for some time. ” 15 minutes said the political scientist.

This week, Twitter marked two of Trump’s posts as unfounded, claiming that a postal vote would lead to fraud and that the elections would be “rigged.”

The President of the United States later wrote that Twitter was interfering in the 2020 presidential election in this way and “completely suppressing freedom of expression,” which he, as president, would not allow.

Twitter is likely to have angered the president further after marking his record for protests in Minneapolis on Friday as “glorification of violence.”

L. Kojala noted that social media leaders emphasized that it is extremely difficult to evaluate political argumentation from an objective perspective.

“And if you try to do that, it is natural that there is a lot of resistance, because the perception of what is true when politicians talk about it is not unequivocal,” said the director of RESC.

BBC journalist Anthony Zurcher writes that Trump’s true purpose may be symbolic. The move is said to make Twitter think more about verifying the facts in the president’s tweets.

Trump, who criticizes traditional media for its bias, uses direct communication on the Twitter platform.

Trump told White House reporters that he made the decision because the big tech companies “have unlimited power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, change any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”

“We can no longer allow this to continue,” the president said.

Republican Senator and fierce social media critic Josh Hawley said that if Internet companies “tend to interpret, censor, and behave like traditional publishers, they should be treated like traditional publishers and should no longer be subject to any special exemptions from the federal government “

Republican Senator Marco Rubio said the order said that if social media decided to play the role of editor as editor, they should no longer be responsible.