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As he battles the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has been claiming extraordinarily sweeping powers that legal scholars say the president simply doesn’t have. And he has repeatedly refusing to spell out the legal basis for those powers.“ It’s not that the president does’t have a remarkable amount of power to respond to a public health crisis. It’s that these are not the powers he has,” said Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas School of Law professor who specializes in constitutional and national security law. (Colvin, 5/28)

Twitter has taken the unprecedented step of adding fact-check warnings to two of President Donald Trump’s tweets that falsely called mail-in ballots “substantially fraudulent” and predicted a “Rigged Election.” On Wednesday, the president threatened to impose new regulation on social media companies or even to “close them down.” But Twitter’s move and Trump’s reaction raise a host of questions, including why Twitter acted now, how it decides when to use such warnings and what its newly assumed role means for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Ortutay, 5/28)

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to order a review of a law that has long protected Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google from being responsible for the material posted by their users, according to a draft executive order and a source familiar with the situation. (Bose and Shepardson, 5/28)

Such an order, which officials said was still being drafted and was subject to change, would make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they move to suspend users or delete posts, among other examples. (Haberman and Conger, 5/28)

Trump’s directive chiefly seeks to embolden federal regulators to rethink a portion of law known as Section 230, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a document that could still evolve and has not been officially signed by the president. That law spares tech companies from being held liable for the comments, videos and other content posted by users on their platforms. The law is controversial. It allows tech companies the freedom to police their platforms for abuse without fear of lawsuits. (Romm and Dawsey, 5/28)

The order would direct the Commerce Department to petition the Federal Communications Commission to set up a rule-making proceeding to clarify the scope of Section 230, the people said. Federal regulators including the Federal Trade Commission also would strengthen an existing online bias reporting tool the administration set up earlier. The FTC could begin to take enforcement action against companies that limit users’ speech in a manner that isn’t fully disclosed in their terms of service. And federal agencies would be directed to review their advertising contracts with companies that engage in speech censorship. (McKinnon and Ballhaus, 5/27)

The statute has helped tech giants earn many billions of dollars from users' tweets, posts, likes, photos and videos, with limited legal liability, while giving them broad leeway to remove material they consider "objectionable." But Trump and his supporters contend they are abusing that power. "These platforms act like they are potted plants when [in reality] they are curators of user experiences, i.e. the man behind the curtain for everything we can see or hear,” an administration official familiar with the issue said Wednesday night. The person said the order, which was described as broad and high level, would address complaints that the online platforms are deceiving people by picking and choosing what content to allow or block instead of acting as politically neutral platforms or moderators. (Lima, 5/27)

It was the pandemic, Twitter says, that freed the company to attach fact-check warnings to a pair of Present Donald Trump’s tweets this week. Critics have complained for years that Twitter lets Trump run wild on the platform. But the company had generally taken a hands-off approach to the president, partly because of a company policy that considers it in the public’s interest to know what world leaders are thinking, and partly because Twitter judged many of Trump’s tweets to fall into a gray area not covered by its rules banning specific behaviors like abuse or posting hateful content. (Scola, 5/27)

The three young idealists met before this all started, when the most pressing issues they faced were climate change, environmental justice and ensuring clean water for Detroit residents. They were all organizers of a sort: eager to do the unglamorous work of convincing people that they could dream bigger, and demand more from their government. They came from very different parts of a segregated region. Justin Onwenu, 23, lives in Detroit, where 79 percent of the population is black. Bridget Quinn, 35, and Lauren Schandevel, 23, are from the overwhelmingly white suburbs of Macomb County, just north of the city. (Medina, 5/28)