Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Wednesday separately announced they were both working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal protections that ensure the company is not held liable for what is posted on its platform.<\/p>\n
The lawmakers began work on legislation following Twitter\u2019s decision to add warnings to two tweets by President Trump this week in which he railed against California\u2019s decision to expand mail-in voting. Trump tweeted without evidence that mail-in voting could increase voter fraud.<\/p>\n
Both Hawley and Gaetz argued that Twitter\u2019s decision to flag the tweets called its legal liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act into question. Section 230 protects social media platforms from facing lawsuits over what users post.<\/p>\n
Hawley sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday questioning why the platform should be given Section 230 protections and tweeted that he would soon introduce legislation to end \u201cgovernment giveaways\u201d under the legal shield.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf @Twitter wants to editorialize & comment on users\u2019 posts, it should be divested of its special status under federal law (Section 230) & forced to play by same rules as all other publishers,\u201d Hawley tweeted. \u201cFair is fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hawley questioned Dorsey on whether Twitter\u2019s \u201cfact check\u201d was part of an effort to \u201ctarget the President for political reasons\u201d and raised concerns that Twitter fact-checkers were biased against Trump.<\/p>\n
Gaetz also announced the action on Wednesday against Twitter, tweeting that he was \u201cworking on legislation to revise Section 230 so we don’t have election interference from companies like Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gaetz said on his \u201cHot Takes\u201d podcast that while he is not \u201cin favor of a special attack on Twitter,\u201d he does think Section 230 protections for the company should be reevaluated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25377,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25376\/revisions\/25377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}