Trump's social media EO, if enacted, would create problems for him, attacking the legal provision that allows inflammatory, harassing, and untruthful messages
like the president's. That, of course, is not the outcome Mr. Trump wants. https://www.nytimes.com/... @peterbakernyt Michael M. Grynbaum / @grynbaum : Trump in Nov. 2016 to the NYT editorial board: “Actually, somebody said to me on [libel laws], they said, 'It's a great idea softening up those laws, but you may get sued a lot more.' I said, 'You know, you're right, I never thought of that.'” https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... @kolatubosun : They're not thinking at all, and it shows. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This story sits at the hinge between two earlier arcs. In late 2016, [[a:879000|Trump's denunciations on Twitter were already stress-testing the platform's incitement rules]] as his followers harassed named individuals — meaning the president was simultaneously the service's most consequential user and its most rule-straining one.
By May 2020, that tension turned legislative: the executive order targets the legal shield protecting platforms from liability for user posts, and the Times' argument — echoed by Grynbaum's resurfaced 2016 clip of Trump conceding softer libel laws would mean 'you may get sued a lot more' — is that dismantling it cuts against its chief proponent. Days later, the order drew its first court challenge from the Center for Democracy and Technology, and analysts noted the feud was boosting Twitter's engagement and ad sales even as it spotlighted the company's anti-misinformation work.
First-order effects
- If enacted, the order forces platforms like Twitter to treat inflammatory or false presidential posts as potential liability rather than protected speech, colliding directly with the harassment dynamics documented since 2016.
Second-order effects
- Narrowed platform immunity exposes prolific users to direct legal claims — a dynamic Trump himself acknowledged in 2016 when told looser libel laws meant 'you may get sued a lot more.'
Third-order effects
- The pattern extends past the order itself: by mid-2021 Trump's follow-on claims that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube violated his First Amendment rights were being assessed as legally doomed vehicles for PR and fundraising, suggesting the fight migrates from statute to spectacle while platform CEOs keep making governance calls as gut decisions under duress.
The trend: US politics is shifting platform-governance fights from content-moderation policy into litigation and liability politics, with the loudest participants often the most exposed.