Draft of Trump Executive Order Leaks Amid Feud with Twitter: Creates Group to Potentially Punish ‘Unfair’ Social Media

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President Donald Trump’s new executive order on “Big Tech” is expected to ask United States Attorney General William Barr to establish a working group on the matter and to ask the Federal Communications Commission to review how a liability law is enforced, according to a Thursday report.

That working group will be tasked with “potential enforcement of state statutes that prohibit online platforms from engaging in unfair and deceptive acts and practices,” according to a draft of the order obtained by Protocol, and will invite state attorneys general to participate.

The move comes after Twitter on Tuesday “fact-checked” one of Trump’s tweets about vote-by-mail balloting. Trump subsequently said on Twitter that the platform was “interfering in the 2020 presidential election.” The White House said Trump would sign an executive order on Thursday in response to the situation.

In addition to the working group, the order is expected to direct federal agencies to stop advertising on platforms that have instituted “viewpoint-based speech restrictions,” and to move complaints of anti-conservative bias on social media filed with the White House over to the Federal Trade Commission. That agency is also tasked with investigating unfair or deceptive business practices.

The order additionally asks the FCC to review Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law allows social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to define themselves as distributors of content rather than as publishers, enabling them to escape liability for defamatory content their users publish.

Republicans have said the companies should be defined as publishers if they begin moderating content in a manner similar to traditional media companies. The White House last year reportedly drafted an executive order asking the FCC to review the law, but that order was ultimately never introduced.