Last December, during a conversation with the New York Times editorial board, then-candidate Joe Biden declared that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a foundational law of the Internet that was intended to govern how companies moderate speech online, “immediately should be revoked, number one.” Presidents, of course, can’t simply make legislation disappear, but they can try to move things along with executive orders.

Back in May, Donald Trump issued an order meant to dissuade social-media companies from exercising editorial control over material that appeared on their platforms. Twitter had recently infuriated him by adding a generic fact-check label to a tweet of his that declared mail-in ballots to be fraudulent. Biden’s complaint about Section 230, however, was not that social-media companies were exercising too much editorial control but that they were not exerting enough. It is irresponsible, Biden suggested, that Section 230 immunizes companies from libel and civil suits for material posted on their sites by third parties, no matter how harmful.