Politics

A new lawsuit against Trump’s Section 230 executive order argues it chills speech about voting

The suit accuses the president of using the order to retaliate against Twitter, infringing on the public's right to receive information.

President Trump in the Oval Office

Like an earlier lawsuit filed against the order, this case charges the Trump administration with violating the First Amendment rights of tech platforms.

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A coalition of voting rights and watchdog groups is suing the Trump administration over its recent executive order, which aims to curb liability protections for tech platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They argue that the order was retaliatory, seeking to limit voters' right to receive information about the election.

Like an earlier lawsuit filed against the order, which came just days after Twitter applied fact-checking labels to President Trump's misleading tweets about mail-in ballots, this case charges the Trump administration with violating the First Amendment rights of tech platforms. But it also crucially accuses the administration of infringing on the First Amendment rights of everyone else who might receive information from those platforms. In First Amendment law, this is known as the "right to receive."

The plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed Thursday in the Northern District of California, include voting advocacy groups Rock the Vote, Voto Latino and Common Cause, as well as the watchdog organizations MapLight and Free Press.

"The executive order is fundamentally incompatible with the First Amendment. It deprives users of their right to receive information curated by online platforms, including information critical of President Trump or corrective of his falsehoods," the suit reads. "It is unlawfully retaliatory and coercive, sending a clear and chilling message: question President Trump and face retribution from the entire Executive Branch."

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the executive order unconstitutional and invalid and to prohibit anyone from implementing or enforcing it. The defendants in the case include: President Trump; Attorney General William Barr; Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross; associate administrator of the Office of Telecommunications and Information Douglas Kinkoph; and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

According to Danielle Citron, a Section 230 scholar and professor of law at Boston University, the plaintiffs will have to prove there has been some harm done as a result of the president's actions. "The self-governance approach contends that free speech matters because it lets listeners figure out the kind of government that they want to live under," Citron said. "But you need a concrete and particularized legal injury, not just a generalized grievance, that can be redressable by the suit."

Section 230 has emerged as a political flashpoint under the Trump administration, which has used anecdotal evidence to repeatedly accuse Facebook and Twitter of silencing conservatives. The law protects online platforms from being held liable for what other people say on those platforms, and also empowers them to moderate content that is objectionable. Losing that protection, tech companies fear, would open them up to endless lawsuits, which they argue could be devastating especially for smaller platforms.

The order, which one White House official told Protocol had been "rammed" through after Twitter fact-checked President Trump, seeks to limit the scope of those protections, in part through new rule-making at the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC has already opened public comments on that rule-making.

This is not the first suit the administration has faced since issuing the order. In June, the Center for Democracy and Technology also sued President Trump, making the case that the order "seeks to curtail and chill the constitutionally protected speech of all online platforms and individuals."

That case is still ongoing. But the plaintiffs in the new suit, several of whom focus on voter turnout, wanted to bring special attention to the substance of the speech President Trump was attempting to curtail. "He wants to make false statements about voting, promote misinformation about voting and then try to stop social media platforms from fact-checking his speech," said Kristy Parker of Protecting Democracy, one of the lawyers bringing the suit.

The plaintiffs argue that President Trump has not only infringed on people's right to receive curated information about voting, but that the retaliatory nature of the executive order is itself a violation of the First Amendment and an attempt to chill future speech.

"The president certainly has the right to speak. He has the right to give his opinion," Parker said. "What he does not have the prerogative to do is to threaten to use his official powers to take punitive action against speakers based on the fact that he does not like their speech."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins