Trump is threatening to close down social media companies. Can he actually do that?
US President Donald Trump has threatened to regulate or close down social media platforms over purported anti-conservative bias. | Saul Martinez/Getty Images
Even if Trump’s executive order tries to shut down social media companies, it would face an immediate court battle. President Donald Trump has built his political brand by posting a steady stream of misleading information, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks on Twitter. Now that Twitter did something unprecedented and fact-checked two of his tweets, he’s escalating his typical behavior.
After Twitter called out Trump’s false statements about vote-by-mail ballots, the president fired back , tweeting that social media platforms “totally silence conservatives voices” [sic] and threatening to “strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down” altogether.
Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
And on Wednesday, reports indicated that Trump plans to sign an executive order pertaining to social media as soon as Thursday. We don’t know the details of what the executive order would do, but if it’s an attempt to “close them down,” as he threatened, it’s likely to be immediately challenged in court.
So, does this mean Trump can actually shut down Twitter and other social media platforms?
It’s unlikely. Despite Trump’s indications to the contrary, Twitter is not violating the First Amendment by marking up his tweets. Unlike the government, Twitter is a private company that can moderate its users’ speech as it pleases, without legal penalty.
But Trump can still make things harder for these platforms, particularly bigger companies like Facebook and Google that have become targets of antitrust scrutiny. Trump can also use Twitter’s fact-check of his tweets to bolster the unfounded claim he and other Republicans have pushed that Big Tech has an anti-conservative bias. And beyond that, his anti-tech crusades serve to sow confusion and distract the public from larger issues at hand : the persistent spread of the coronavirus, the crashing job market, and how economic inequality in the US was a growing problem even before the pandemic.
The freedom of speech argument
Conservatives like Trump have long argued, without evidence, that they’re being silenced on social media despite the fact that some of the most popular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts are run by conservative political and media figures.
The complaints usually arise when a social media company deletes a conservative figure’s tweets or takes action against their account for violating the rules — for example, when Twitter,...
