US President Donald Trump has signed an unprecedented executive order that could strip social media of legal protection and punish it on charges of restricting freedom of expression and conspiring with the Chinese government against the United States.
Before signing the executive order on Thursday, the White House said it was time to stop the "biased" social media behavior.
The American network "CNN" said that the executive order aims to limit the power of giant social media platforms.
In this decision, Trump relies on a reinterpretation of a law dating back to 1996 that protects Internet sites and technology companies from lawsuits.
The executive order considers in its draft that social media should not be subject to this protection, because it has not adopted goodwill in its work.
The network said that the executive order targets the Etiquette Act, whose paragraph provides 230 wide immunity for websites.
The draft executive order directs federal agencies to amend the way this law is implemented. Law experts have previously described this paragraph as "the 26 words that created the Internet."
Strict action
The executive order draft stated that a limited number of Internet platforms cannot be allowed to choose the speech Americans can access, noting that this practice is anti-democratic.
If the executive order is issued, it will be the most stringent measure by the Trump administration against social networks. Various American media outlets have suggested that the executive order could be appealed to the judiciary.
"In a country that has long cherished freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of Internet platforms to choose the speech Americans can access and transmit online," the draft says.
"This is basically a non-American and anti-democratic practice. When big and powerful social media companies exercise control over opinions that are against their opinion, they exert a dangerous force," she says.
The draft also accuses social media platforms of "invoking inconsistent, illogical and baseless justifications for imposing censorship or punishing Americans' speech."
It also blames Google for what it considered to be the Chinese government's help in monitoring its citizens, and accuses Twitter of spreading Chinese advertising and Facebook by taking advantage of Chinese ads.
The upcoming decision orders a review of "dishonest or fraudulent practices" of Facebook and Twitter, and calls on the government to reconsider posting ads on services it classifies as "violating the principles of freedom of expression."
The roots of the crisis
and this conflict erupted after Twitter added a notification in the form of a blue exclamation point on Trump's tweets last Tuesday about allegations of fraud in a mail poll. The notice alerts readers to check publications.
The White House said that Twitter's "fact-checking" option on the president's tweets was biased. He accused the Twitter site of allowing the Chinese to use it to spread misleading information about the Corona virus and other things.
Twitter CEO defended the decision to put a check mark, and said that this move does not make Twitter a verdict of the truth.
And Jack Dorsey considered that the role of Twitter is to link the threads of conflicting statements and show the information a matter of controversy so that people rule themselves.
He stressed that more transparency by Twitter is necessary, so that people can verify and know the reasons behind the steps that have been taken.
Commenting on Trump's threats, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "I must first understand what they actually intend to do, but I generally think that a government’s censorship of a platform because it is concerned about the censorship that this platform may impose, is not a right reaction. ".