President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order banning “federal censorship” of online speech, drawing praise from supporters who say the Biden administration illegally suppressed conservative voices and fire from critics who fear an unchecked wave of false and dangerous information on social media could endanger the American public.
“Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve,” the executive order read.
The order bans federal officials from any conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” It also prohibits taxpayer resources from being used to curtail free speech and instructs the Justice Department and other agencies to investigate the actions the Biden administration took and to propose “remedial actions.”
Critics say censorship order could fuel disinformation
The executive order fulfills a campaign pledge to conservatives who for years have alleged that biased Big Tech companies collude with Democrats to suppress their voices.
Limiting communication and coordination between Big Tech companies and the federal government could jeopardize public safety in natural disasters and health emergencies, some observers warned. Conspiracy theories and lies surged on social media platforms during the Los Angeles firestorm this month.
Disinformation watchdogs say Trump’s executive order will encourage foreign and other bad actors to pollute social media platforms with lies and other harmful content to enrage and divide Americans.
“What Trump’s executive order on ‘Ending Federal Censorship’ really does is chill critical speech about bad actors who use disinformation as a tool to destabilize our country and profit from lies,” said Nina Jankowicz, who worked in the Biden administration and is now CEO of the American Sunlight Group, an advocacy group that pushes back on online disinformation.
Conservatives say Big Tech colluded with Democrats
Multiple lawsuits have accused the Biden administration of leaning on social media platforms to take down lawful speech about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently backed up those claims, alleging senior administration officials pressured his employees to inappropriately take down or throttle content during the pandemic.
The Biden administration has said it was combating the spread of falsehoods to protect the public. Last year, the Supreme Court sided with Biden in a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and a small number of social media users who had accused administration officials of crossing the line.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the decisions by social media companies to take down content could not be directly traced back to government influence.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill slammed the Supreme Court decision as a free pass to “the worst government coercion scheme in history.”
Facebook, X and other social media loosen content moderation
The order is unlikely to convince conservatives that Big Tech does not censor their speech. That perception peaked in 2021 when the major social media platforms banned Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and led to Florida and Texas passing laws intended to stop the alleged social media censorship.
Complaints of ideological bias come from across the political spectrum, but it’s difficult to prove social media platforms are targeting any one group since tech companies disclose so little about how they decide what content is allowed and what is not.
Social media companies say they don’t target conservatives, only harmful speech that violates their rules.
But now those rules are getting much looser.
Meta and other big social media platforms are taking a more hands-off approach to content moderation in Trump’s second term, dialing back efforts to fact-check information on their platforms and signaling their support for the new administration.
In the Capitol Rotunda as Trump was sworn in as the 47th president, Zuckerberg, X owner Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – collectively worth just shy of a trillion dollars – sat in front of Trump’s cabinet picks and behind his family.
