Good morning. 🔥 While protests erupted in Minneapolis last night over the death of George Floyd, President Donald Trump, fresh off of alleging that Twitter was stifling his freedom of speech, tweeted, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

• As the Daily Beast's Max Tani notes, "your free speech on a platform isn’t really being threatened when you can use that same platform to suggest shooting people."

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Political theater

What is President Trump's executive order endgame?

Moving the Market: President Donald Trump has signed an executive order empowering federal regulators to crack down on social media companies that censor political speech or exhibit political bias, a dramatic display of political theater that is likely legally unenforceable and will probably go nowhere.

• The order also suggests penalizing these companies by revoking Section 230 protections that guard them from liability for the content that users post on their platforms. Such a move would undercut free speech by forcing social media companies to censor more content, including posts by President Trump himself.

The big picture: The president's executive order is toothless and highly unlikely to change the law, as we explained yesterday. (As a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official told the New York Times, "This is not how public policy is made in the United States.") It may also be illegal in that it threatens the First Amendment.

• That is not to say the order is entirely insignificant. At the very least, it rekindles the debate about big tech and could hasten the arrival of actual regulation. But what that regulation looks like is still uncertain, save to say it probably won't look like what Trump is proposing.

The big question: If Trump can't actually change the law, what is his endgame? Why is he going to war with the social media platforms, especially given how much he relies on Twitter to drive the political narrative and on Facebook and YouTube to advertise for re-election?

• The most likely answer is probably the simplest one: He was mad at Jack Dorsey and Twitter for fact-checking his tweets and wanted to exact revenge. An executive order, which his administration has considered implementing for years, was his most dramatic and readily available option.

But there are additional benefits:

1. The freedom to mislead. Trump's social media posts often test the boundaries of factual accuracy or float unproven conspiracies. If these companies start to fact-check or contextualize his tweets, it will limit his ability to mislead voters. Twitter's landmark decision to fact-check his tweet about mail-in voting is a perfect example.

• 2. The freeze effect. By issuing an executive order and forcing a debate over issues of bias and censorship, Trump may force social media companies to exert more caution in how they handle his tweets and campaign ads going forward. Even the slightest action by Twitter (a simple fact-check) will be heavily scrutinized and likely condemned by the president and his supporters.

• 3. Bias reinforcement. A national debate about bias at social media companies is likely to cloud future efforts to fact-check or contextualize the president. Some voters who may have been open-minded to Twitter's fact-checking may now question whether they can trust Twitter at all given the president's accusations of bias.

• 4. Distraction. A majority of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now taken the lives of more than 100,000 Americans and extracted severe damage on the nation's economy. A war with big tech distracts from this news, if only for a news cycle.

What's next: The executive order will inevitably be challenged in federal court, where it is likely to be overturned. Meanwhile, the social media companies have issued statements expressing their commitment to free speech and defending the importance of Section 230.

• At the same time, those companies may now be a little more cautious about fact-checking or contextualizing the president's tweets. In which case, the executive order will be a net win for Trump.

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The backstory

Behind Twitter's fact-check

Big in the Bay: Brandon Borrman, Twitter’s vice president of global communications, talks to OneZero's Will Oremus about the decision-making process that led the company to fact-check President Trump, setting in motion yesterday's executive order.

• "The company needed to do what’s right," he said, "and we knew from a comms perspective that all hell would break loose."

The full tick tock.

💻 Check, check 💻

"Data from Facebook... pours cold water on the assertion that conservative voices are being silenced," CNN's Oliver Darcy reports. "In fact... content from conservative news organizations dominates Facebook."

• "Over the last month, the top performing news organization in the U.S. was Fox News, [which] captured 13% of all interactions among U.S. news organizations. ... The second [was] Breitbart... at 9%."

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty

Maxing out

John Stankey's soft start

Talk of Tinseltown: AT&T's new streaming service "is off to a soft start," Bloomberg's Gerry Smith reports. "About 90,000 people downloaded the $15-a-month HBO Max mobile app on Wednesday, its first day, according to the measurement firm SensorTower."

• "That number is far less than the tally for Walt Disney Co.’s Disney+, which attracted 4 million mobile users on its launch day back in November, according to SensorTower."

• "A spokesman for AT&T’s WarnerMedia... said the figure isn’t accurate but didn’t provide a different one." (Important caveat: SensorTower only tracks mobile downloads.)

The big picture: AT&T CEO-in-waiting John Stankey hopes to get to 50 million subscribers by 2025. While many (but not all!) of HBO's existing ~35 million subscribers will shift their subscriptions to HBO Max, new subscribers could be harder to come by given that they're being asked to pay $15 a month in the middle of a pandemic.

• As The New Yorker's Doreen St. Felix puts it, "what seemed like a necessity a few months ago may now be, for many people, an unjustifiable luxury."

Market Links

• Rony Abovitz steps down at Magic Leap (BI)

• Zhang Yiming faces TikTok rival in U.S. (Information)

• Evan Spiegel plans expanded developer platform (Information)

• Jill Hazelbaker sells $8.6m in Uber shares after layoffs (BI)

• Bob Bakish wins John Krasinski bidding war (THR)

Isabel Infantes/Getty

⚽ Sports report

EPL returns in boon for NBC

Talk of TV Land: The English Premier League says it is planning to return on June 17, a huge win for rights holders NBCUniversal and Sky that could provide a much-needed injection of advertising revenue. (NBCUniversal and Sky are both owned by Comcast, which is also the parent company of NBC News.)

• What's next: The plan is still contingent on the pandemic, but should the season go forward, all 92 of the EPL's remaining games will be broadcast on NBC Sports, per a network spokesperson.

🏀 Back in the States, the NBA, MLB and NHL are all moving toward resuming play in July.

🌞 What's next: The weekend.

See you Monday.