Social Media Companies Can’t Be Trusted to Protect Our Democracy
Social media platforms have become a central element of modern political life — too important to allow them to be run according to the whims of either an unbalanced president like Donald Trump or a few tech billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office before signing an executive order related to regulating social media, on May 28, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Doug Mills-Pool / Getty Images)
President Trump’s tweets now come with a warning label. Below his recent tweet dismissing mail-in votes as “substantially fraudulent” is a linked advisory from Twitter: “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” — a message that both flags Trump’s tweet as fake news and reminds users that Twitter is the arbiter of public speech.

Trump and his supporters howled “censorship!” accusing the social media company of silencing conservative voices. An enraged Trump quickly set about crafting an executive order to limit Twitter’s ability to “selectively censor.” The order, currently being drafted, aims to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which enables social media companies to avoid “intermediary liability” for the things people say or do on their platforms and, on the flip side, allows them to act as “Good Samaritans,” policing their sites as they see fit.