Trump Escalates His Section 230 Rants By Threatening Defense Spending
Donald Trump must really hurting from #DiaperDon trending on Twitter as he’s now taken his Twitter rant and gone next level with it. He’s now serving up threats that if he doesn’t get his way by having congress repeal section 230, he’ll deprive the armed forces of funding:
President Donald Trump has long been an outspoken foe of big technology companies. And in recent months, he has focused his ire on Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. In May, Trump called on the Federal Communications Commission to reinterpret the law — though it’s not clear the agency has the power to do that. Since then, he has tweeted about the issue incessantly. On Tuesday evening, Trump ratcheted up his campaign against Section 230. In a tweet, he called the law “a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity.” He warned that “if the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill.”
The NDAA is a massive spending bill that Congress passes each year to authorize funding for the military. This year’s version, now under active discussion on Capitol Hill, is expected to cost around $740 billion. The NDAA is seen as a “must pass” bill because no one wants to be blamed for holding up funding for the troops. So inserting language into it can be a way to pass proposals that might not stand on their own. But there’s also a risk of a backlash — especially if a measure is seen as unrelated to the military. This may be why Trump has started claiming that Section 230 is a “threat to our national security,” since that would theoretically make it germane to a defense funding bill. Trump’s campaign to repeal Section 230 appears to go beyond mere tweets. The White House is reportedly telling members of Congress the same thing in private that the president is telling his 88 million Twitter followers: that he will veto the NDAA if it doesn’t repeal or at least overhaul Section 230.
You just have to shake your head at this as this sounds like something an 8 year old would do. Which is really sad. The fact is that I don’t see congress doing this, and as a result people in harms way may get hurt. And that’s simply wrong.
Oh well, at least he will go away on January 20th 2021 and hopefully never to return.
December 10, 2020 at 11:49 am
[…] talked about the fact that President Trump has been whining and complaining about nuking Section 230 which would strip the protections from nearly every internet venue with […]