The draft Executive Order disregards the 1st Amendment & improperly attempts to circumvent Congress by rewriting the law that underlies much of our modern Internet. It mischaracterizes existing law to punish platforms whose ability to curate content is constitutionally protected.
That this EO appears to be the President’s personal retaliation against Twitter for marking a tweet of his for fact-checking gives us no confidence that the process created by the EO is intended or likely to produce fair results.
The First Amendment, as well as Section 230, protects the right of platforms to make editorial decisions about content they host, and those protections help support a free and informed public debate, online and in everyday life.
Although the EO purports to advance freedom of speech, it disregards the well-established First Amendment principle of editorial freedom, by which the government cannot force a publisher to speak in ways it does not want to.
We agree that content moderation is broken and lacks a human rights framing. Our Santa Clara Principles, Who Has Your Back, and OnlineCensorship.org projects have focused on this. But we have rejected legal mandates, and this EO shows why that was the right call.
Speech regulations are a dangerous tool to hand a government and have historically been used to retaliate against views government wants to suppress and to boost views it supports. This EO appears to be exactly that type of retaliation.
