If Trump’s May 28 executive order were to end up restricting the ability of private social media platforms like Twitter to tag tweets like his as misleading, it would violate not just the Communications Decency Act (CDA) but the First Amendment. See this thread for my analysis:
Nothing the president or agencies like the FCC and FTC can legally do could successfully censor such private Internet comment, so the executive order (EO) that Trump has unfurled is a big nothingburger in terms of responding to what Twitter did to provoke Trump’s outrage.
No conduct by Twitter, Facebook, or other social media platforms that this EO could possibly make actionable would’ve been immunized by Sec. 230 of the CDA anyway. But the EO isn’t therefore rendered harmless.
On the contrary, the very announcement of this EO constitutes a vague and ambiguous threat likely to chill and deter the kind of entirely responsible comment that Twitter employed to minimize the harm that factually baseless and irresponsible tweets by the president could do.
Thus the launch of this EO, timed cynically to distract from the tragedy of over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths in 3 months & Trump’s responsibility for at least 30,000 of those deaths, is an abuse of power that could well cause injury out of all proportion to its enforceable specifics.
