President Trump tweeted Wednesday that Republicans felt social-media platforms were trying to ‘totally silence’ conservatives.
Photo: Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg NewsWASHINGTON—A draft of an executive order President Trump is expected to sign on Thursday would seek to limit the broad legal protection that federal law currently provides social-media and other online platforms, according to people familiar with the draft.
The draft order would make it easier for federal regulators to hold companies such as Twitter and Facebook liable for curbing users’ speech, for example by suspending their accounts or deleting their posts, the people said.
The draft isn’t yet completed and is subject to change, the people said. It comes after Twitter on Tuesday moved for the first time to apply a fact-checking notice to tweets by the president on the subject of voter fraud. Mr. Trump on Tuesday accused the company of stifling free speech and vowed to take action.
The executive order would mark the Trump administration’s most aggressive effort to take action against social-media companies, which the president has threatened to do for years. The order would also likely be challenged in court, experts said.
The White House declined to comment.
As drafted, the White House order would seek to reshape the way that federal regulators view Twitter and other social-media companies—not as hosts of speech but as monopolies that control millions of Americans’ daily experiences on their platforms, according to one of the people. It could also lay groundwork for treating them as public squares where individuals’ First Amendment rights are protected. The draft order is far-reaching in scope, the people said.
The current federal legal protections for social-media companies were adopted by Congress in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That law gives online companies broad immunity from liability for their users’ actions, as well as wide latitude to police content on their sites. Critics across the political spectrum have argued that the law now provides the tech giants too much power.
In essence, the White House draft order would make the case that tech companies should lose their Section 230 protection if they take action to discriminate against users or limit their access to a platform without providing a fair hearing, or in ways that aren’t spelled out in the platform’s terms of service, the people said.
The order would direct the Commerce Department to petition the Federal Communications Commission to set up a rule-making proceeding to clarify the scope of Section 230, the people said.
Federal regulators including the Federal Trade Commission also would strengthen an existing online bias reporting tool the administration set up earlier. The FTC could begin to take enforcement action against companies that limit users’ speech in a manner that isn’t fully disclosed in their terms of service. And federal agencies would be directed to review their advertising contracts with companies that engage in speech censorship.
Trump administration officials have been discussing the executive order in various forms since 2018, as the president grew increasingly frustrated with tech companies, people familiar with the discussions said. In recent weeks, those discussions have picked up again. In mid-May, Mr. Trump tweeted that the “Radical Left” was in “total command & control” of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google and said the administration was “working to remedy this illegal situation.”
Write to John D. McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com and Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com
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