Trump studying executive order to get antitrust investigations of social media discrimination

Bloomberg:
The White House has drafted an executive order for President Donald Trump’s signature that would instruct federal antitrust and law enforcement agencies to open investigations into the business practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc. and other social media companies.

The order is in its preliminary stages and hasn’t yet been run past other government agencies, according to a White House official. Bloomberg News obtained a draft of the order.

The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it’s signed actions that could potentially “protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.”

The document doesn’t name any specific companies. If signed, the order would represent a significant escalation of Trump’s antipathy toward Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies, whom he has publicly accused of silencing conservative voices and news sources online.

“Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices," Trump said on Twitter in August. “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”
...
While there are some examples, particularly at Google where management has talked about cooking the search results to push a liberal agenda or thwart a conservative one, many to the abuses are by liberal employees at places like Twitter and Facebook who take such actions on their own. 

This suggests a lack of management that results in discrimination.  These companies probably need compliance operations to ensure fairness in their product in much the same way that brokerage companies have a process to guard against employees taking advantage of customers.

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