It's Friday, May 29th. I'm Achila Hughes.

And I'm Gideon Resnick and this is what a day where we're hoping to socially distance from our couch this weekend.

Yeah, I plan on socially distancing in a chair.

I'm gonna socially distance in a PS4 game.

Ha ha ha!

On today's show, an interview with Varshani Prakash of Sunrise Movement about expanding Joe Biden's climate change policy, then some headlines.

But first, the latest. President Trump signed an executive order aimed at social media companies yesterday and at one point said he would shut down Twitter if he could.

So Gideon, what exactly is going on here besides the regular old bullshit theatrics?

Honestly, Mr. President, we here at WOD are telling you to shut it down. But in all seriousness, here's what we know.

The order is aimed at limiting this broad legal protection that is afforded to companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

These protections allow them to moderate content and not moderate content as they see fit.

They are also protected from liability for content that is posted on their site.

And as we know, there is a lot of shady, shitty content that ends up there.

But this all goes back to a law that was first passed in 1996 called the Communications Decency Act and in particular, Section 230 of that law.

Now, Trump wants to strip these companies of any legal protection if they decide to moderate or restrict certain voices on their platforms, i.e. his voice when he posts dangerous misinformation.

And the big caveat, there were immediate questions about whether this order is actually enforceable.

Legal experts say it's not likely to have any immediate practical effect.

Yeah, and as you alluded to, this comes after Twitter put Get the Facts Warning on a couple posts from Trump that relies about the use of mail-in ballots.

Right. The fact check was viewed as a poultry half-hearted effort to moderate the content instead of doing something else.

But what's also kind of ironic here is that some legal experts have said that Section 230, which Trump is so fired up about, is kind of what is protecting him in doing all these posts that he does that are lies and dangerous provocations.

Because if this order were to magically lift the legal immunity that's afforded to Twitter, it could be Trump's own tweets that could spark lawsuits.

Awesome.

...