President Donald Trump tossed a grenade into the social media world Thursday with an executive order threatening action against tech companies. But the more important fight for online speech wasn't happening at the White House.
Instead, it was happening online and through the media between Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The two men have done more than perhaps anyone else alive to shape the way public debates happen on the internet, and in the current controversy over how the truth is shaped online, they arguably have much more power than the White House.
Trump's executive order was "95% political theater — rhetoric without legal foundation, and without legal impact," Daphne Keller, the platform regulation director at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, said in an email. She said that the underlying issues were important but that the document itself "reads like a stream of consciousness tweetstorm that some poor staffer had to turn into the form of an Executive Order."
Meanwhile, Dorsey and Zuckerberg have been describing increasingly different and competing visions for how social media networks grapple with politics and elections — and taking the occasional shot at each other.
Zuckerberg this week knocked Twitter for the service's new effort at fact-checking Trump's tweets. He told Fox News and then CNBC that internet services shouldn't be "arbiters of truth," even though Facebook itself plays that role sometimes.
Dorsey fired back in a tweet, saying Twitter was simply connecting the dots "so people can judge for themselves" on a sensitive subject like election procedures. Trump had asserted without evidence that mail-in voting is associated with fraud...….More
