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Trump just escalated his Twitter feud, and 4 other business stories you need to read today

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Welcome to your Thursday business news wrap, where we’re catching you up on the essentials. Also Hot Pockets, the leading economic indicator that we’ve all given up on 2020.
(CNN Business)Welcome to your Thursday business news wrap, where we’re catching you up on the essentials. Also Hot Pockets, the leading economic indicator that we’ve all given up on 2020.
KNIVES OUT
As expected, President Trump fired off an executive order on Thursday that takes aim at what he calls the « unchecked power » of social platforms, particularly Twitter, his preferred megaphone.
In case you’ve been snoozing through this escalating war of words, here’s a quick recap:
It started on Tuesday when Twitter, for the first time ever, fact-checked several of Trump’s posts and flagged them as misleading. Trump was not pleased. Facebook, for its part, said it wasn’t going to follow suit on similar posts on its platform. Trump then threatened — in a tweet! — to regulate or shut down social media companies, which he has long accused of concealing a far-left liberal agenda.
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WAIT, can he really do that? Probably not. My colleague Brian Fung talked to some lawyers who say the White House is quickly going to stumble over some First Amendment roadblocks.
Meanwhile, the knives came out between Twitter and Facebook. CEOs Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg traded criticism in public appearances, and several former employees posted their own jabs on social media. Shares of both Twitter(TWTR) and Facebook(FB) were down on Thursday as investors anxiously awaited Trump’s order.
WHAT’S NEXT? We’re still parsing the order itself, but you can expect to see a lot of constitutional law scholars on TV in the next few days, plus (presumably) more trash talk between Zuck and Jack and the president of the United States.

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