Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230.

If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable.

However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content.

It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.

Twitter's "fact check" singles out a specific Trump tweet. It's clearly a human intervention by Twitter staff, not user generated content. The subject of Trump's tweet was a political dispute, and while Trump certainly had false statements in his tweet, that's basically par for the course on Twitter.

This raises a bunch of questions. Why is Twitter singling out Trump for his false statements? If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?

We have seen this also with the coronavirus breakout. Medium and other publishers removed posts based that were sanguine data analysis (nothing inflammatory) because they were against the prevailing media sentiment. For example this Medium post [1] was removed based on its content. It did not contain anything inflammatory, violent, or otherwise unsavory. Medium just didn't like what it said.

At what point does Twitter or Medium cease to be a neutral discussion platform, and become more like a publisher that pushes a specific narrative (like Fox News, the New York Times, CNN, etc.). They are certainly within their rights do curate/moderate their platform, but if this continues, we need to start thinking of these companies less like user driven platforms, and more like opinionated publishers.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200321144004/https:/medium.com...