President Donald Trump said he will introduce legislation that may scrap or weaken a law that has protected internet companies, including Twitter and Facebook, in an extraordinary attempt to regulate social media platforms where he has been criticized. Trump wants to remove or change a provision of a law known as section 230 that shields social media companies from liability for content posted by their users.

Trump said U.S. Attorney General William Barr will begin drafting legislation immediately to regulate social media companies. In practice, the law shields any website or service that hosts content - like news outlets’ comment sections, video services like YouTube and social media services like Facebook and Twitter - from lawsuits over content posted by users.

Twitter Inc, Reddit and a group representing major internet firms backed two documentary film groups that have challenged the Trump Administration’s 2019 rules requiring nearly all U.S. visitors to disclose social media user information from the prior five years. In court papers filed, the social media sites and the Internet Association, representing Facebook, Amazon.com, Alphabet and others, said the rules force foreign nationals “to surrender their anonymity in order to travel to the United States” and “chill a vast quantity of speech and associational activity.”

 They said they regularly collaborate with non-U.S. filmmakers and warn that visitors must “consider the risk that a U.S. official will misinterpret their speech on social media, impute others’ speech to them, or subject them to additional scrutiny or delayed processing because of the views they or their contacts have expressed.”

The latest filing comes amid an escalating feud between President Donald Trump and tech companies. Twitter hid a Trump tweet behind a warning for the first time. It came hours after Trump signed an executive order threatening Silicon Valley social media firms with new free speech regulations, after Twitter added a fact-checking tag to two previous tweets.

The State Department rules require disclosure of all social media handles used over the prior five years by U.S. visa applicants, including ones under pseudonyms, on 20 platforms.

Applicants must disclose accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine and Chinese sites Douban, QQ, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Youku; Russian social network VK; Belgian site Twoo; and Latvian site Ask.fm.

Source- Reuters