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An executive order by President Donald Trump may have made national headlines because of his disagreement with the social media company Twitter – but according to one ���ϲ����� Law legal scholar, it may not amount to very much.

directs regulators such as the Federal Trade Commission to reinterpret statutes established by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protected tech companies from criminal and civil liability based on content created by individual users.

The move comes just days after Twitter started to include “fact checking” links attached to Trump’s tweets. Those links alerted readers to information that disputes the president’s assertions about potential consequences of mail-in voting.

���ϲ����� Law Associate Professor David S. Levine, a scholar on technology and intellectual property law, said Trump’s executive order will almost certainly face legal challenges. For starters, he said, executive orders can’t amend statutes passed by Congress and signed into law by previous administrations.

And executive orders do not generally bind independent agencies like Federal Communications Commission and the FTC. Levine said the FTC and FCC probably don’t have authority to act under Section 230, and if the focus of the executive order is content moderation, then the FTC and FCC would not be able to act even if they did have authority.

“It’s unclear what cause of action could credibly be alleged by a politician against a social media platform for ‘fact checking’ them,” Levine said. “Speech platforms are immunized precisely to encourage free speech. If an executive order like this was actually enforceable, we would expect social media companies to curb all forms of speech in their efforts to limit exposure to lawsuits.

“If the endgame is to silence speech platforms, which seems to be the goal, then there are a whole host of other issues about the nature of a free society and the sharing of information.”

Levine has been a leading voice in previous debates over Section 230. Over the past year, some lawmakers have suggested changes to the law that would allow some of what Trump’s executive order has proposed.

Doing away with protections from lawsuits would cost the economy, and small businesses in particular, billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

“Many Americans interact with and benefit from Section 230-facilitated services literally on an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis,” the letter concludes. “As Congress takes a closer look at Section 230, we urge it to avoid unanticipated or unwanted consequences that might negate the critical benefits we currently derive from Section 230, or lead to greater consolidation of communication power in a few leading platforms.”

Levine joined the ���ϲ����� Law faculty in 2009 and has developed an international reputation for his legal research into the areas of lawmaking, trade secrecy, and the ways in which corporations and governments use the law to control access to intellectual property.

An affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, Levine also was a fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy from 2014-2017. He is the founder and host of Stanford University’s KZSU-FM “Hearsay Culture,” an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show, and he co-authored the 2019 textbook “Information Law, Governance, and Cybersecurity.”

In recognition of his scholarly work, Levine was named the Jennings Professor and Emerging Scholar at ���ϲ����� Law for 2017-2019.