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Tech policy experts who spoke to Defense One said that the order would limit the ability of social media networks to block efforts to use their platforms for manipulation and disinformation, since the companies would need to give each disinformation-spreading bot a sort of hearing before it purges them. 

Daphne Keller, a fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, said, "If the [executive order] had legal effect, it would certainly make it much, much harder to police disinformation online." But she said much of the order is of dubious legality, and has produced a color-coded version showing how and why. 

Alex Howard, Director of the Digital Democracy Project at the left-leaning Demand Progress, said that the order "further abuses the powers of the presidency to advance a conspiracy about ideologically motivated censorship on social media without evidence, intimidating private companies from taking even small steps to accurately inform the public about elections, health and other issues by labeling provably false content, much less removing it from the platform if [those companies] decide it violates their policy." 

"This executive order and accompanying messaging appear designed to intimidate the tech companies from taking more aggressive steps to combat disinformation, particularly Twitter," Howard said.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has made disinformation and online platforms a legislative focus, said that the order is an "effort to cow platforms into allowing Trump, dark money groups, and right-wing militias to continue to exploit their tools to sow disinformation, engage in targeted harassment, and suppress voter participation." He described the order as a "distraction from the legitimate efforts to establish common sense regulations for dominant social media platforms."

It's not the first time Trump has tried to regulate social media companies. Last August, the administration drafted a similar executive order that would allow the FTC and FCC to police social media companies for perceived bias. But officials at the FTC and FCC pushed back against the order on constitutional grounds. 

Trump issued the new order after Twitter on Tuesday labeled a provably false tweet about mail-in ballots with a "fact check" link. 

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