White House distances itself from reports that President Trump could target Facebook, Google and Twitter with a new executive order

The White House sought to dis­tance it­self from re­ports that President Donald Trump is con­sid­er­ing an ex­ec­u­tive ord­er that would sub­ject tech giants like Facebook, Goo­gle and Twitter to federal in­ves­ti­gat­ions into al­leged po­lit­i­cal bias. For weeks, top tech com­panies have been on edge, fear­ing that the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion could seek to regu­late the in­dus­try in re­sponse to the president’s tweets at­tack­ing so­cial media sites for si­len­cing con­ser­va­tives online. Their worst sus­pi­cions seemed to come true on Sept 21, with the e­mer­gence of a draft ex­ec­u­tive ord­er that called for near­ly every federal a­gen­cy to study how com­panies like Facebook police their plat­forms and re­fer in­stan­ces of “bias” to the Justice Department for further study. But three White House aides soon in­sist­ed they didn’t write the draft ord­er, didn’t know where it came from and gen­er­al­ly found it to be un­work­able pol­icy. One seni­or White House of­fi­cial con­firmed the docu­ment had been float­ing around the White House but had not gone through the for­mal proc­ess, which is con­trolled by the staff sec­re­tar­y. Lind­say Walters, dep­u­ty White House press sec­re­tar­y, said, “Al­though the White House is con­cerned a­bout the con­duct of online plat­forms and their im­pact on soci­ety, this docu­ment is not the re­sult of an of­fi­cial White House policymaking proc­ess."