From the newsroom of the Washington Post.

Hi, good afternoon. This is Tulu, Aurora, Niko with the Washington Post.

Hi, this is Amy Britton calling me the post.

This is Peter J. This is from the Washington Post.

This is Post Reports. I'm routine powers.

It's Thursday, May 28th.

Today, Trump takes on tech companies, discrimination against Asian American healthcare workers,

and what do you expect when you fly?

So right now, it's midday on Thursday.

And we're expecting President Trump to sign an executive order that will take aim at a key legal shield

that many in Silicon Valley view as fundamental to the Internet as we know it today.

I'm Kat Zakreski and I write the Technology 202 newsletter for the Washington Post.

So this executive order is going to target a particular law that affects tech companies.

What is this law? What is the history of this law? And why is it so important?

So section 230 is a decades old legal provision that protects tech companies from lawsuits for the content that people post on their websites.

So basically, this law has been interpreted by the courts to mean that people can't bring a lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, or other social media companies for the photos, comments, or videos that people might post on their service.

And tech companies see this as really fundamental to the way the Internet exists today because they've been able to grow to great size without concern of onerous litigation.

And it also gives them the ability to take down content without fear of legal retribution, which is key when it comes to policing some of the harmful content that most people don't want to see on the Internet,

like terrorism, child exploitation, and other problematic and criminal content.

So this executive order seems to be coming kind of out of nowhere. Why is this happening now?

So President Trump has threatened for years to regulate the tech companies and frequently antagonize them on Twitter, on Facebook.

But really, the tensions came to a head this week as Twitter took the unprecedented step of labeling some of the president's tweets.

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