Social-Media
Trump's Twitter order breaches First Amendment, claims new lawsuit
President Donald Trump's executive order targeting social media companies faced his first legal challenge Tuesday, claiming Trump had violated the right to free speech of the companies.
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) called Trump's order "retaliatory" in its lawsuit, because it specifically attacked Twitter for using its right to comment and moderate the president's tweets. By attacking Twitter, the organization claimed that Trump's order might discourage other platforms from exercising their right of freedom of speech to moderate the president's posts out of fear of federal government retaliation.
"The Executive Order is intended to prevent social media companies from combating disinformation, voter repression, and abuse on their sites," CDT president and CEO Alexandra Givens said Tuesday in a statement. "The President has made it clear that his goal is to use threats of retaliation and future regulation to intimidate intermediaries into changing the way they moderate content, essentially ensuring that the dangers of voter suppression and disinformation grow unchecked in an election year."
The lawsuit filed for the District of Columbia Tuesday at the US District Court is one of the first legal actions taken against Trump's executive order. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the order, signed last week, could reverse platform liability protections. Under current law, Internet companies such as Twitter have a broad immunity from liability for the content posted on their platforms by their users.
Trump signed the order last week after a series of acts Twitter took against his tweets. Twitter fact-checked two Trump tweets making false statements about mail-in voting and voter fraud on May 26th. It was the president's first fact-check on the website
