New York Times

Twitter continued to add new fact-checking labels to hundreds of tweets, even as the Trump administration issued an executive order to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms. Twitter’s move escalated the confrontation between the company and President Donald Trump, who has fulminated over actions taken by his favorite social media service.

A draft of an executive order President Donald Trump is expected to sign on May 28 would seek to limit the broad legal protection that federal law currently provides social-media and other online platforms. The draft order would make it easier for federal regulators to hold companies such as Twitter and Facebook liable for curbing users’ speech, for example by suspending their accounts or deleting their posts. The executive order would mark the Trump administration’s most aggressive effort to take action against social-media companies, which the president has threatened to do for years.

Twitter for the first time applied a fact-checking notice to a tweet from President Donald Trump, hours after the company denied a widower’s request to delete the president’s posts circulating conspiracy theories about his wife’s death. Twitter applied the fact-checking notices to two tweets from the president about the potential for fraud involving mail-in ballots. With a small label—“Get the facts about mail-in ballots”—and a link to more information, Twitter alerted its users that those claims were unsubstantiated.