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Flanked by some of the Big Tech executives whose companies had suppressed the views of his supporters throughout his predecessor’s term, President Trump on Jan. 20 declared the days of such speech policing over.
Hours later, the president put action behind his words, signing an executive order prohibiting the federal government from engaging in, facilitating, or funding “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
'Americans are free people, and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression.'
The move was celebrated by those who see it as a blow against the censorship industrial complex. Others cast the executive order as giving dangerous license to “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
What is clear is that this is just the latest salvo in an ongoing war over the digital public square, pitting the Trump administration and like-minded Republican congressional allies against not only domestic opponents but the global counter-disinformation ecosystem.
The global speech-policing effort is looking like an early target. Trump himself seemed to convey that when he touted his order in a remote address on January 23 to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The elite global conclave had recently declared “misinformation and disinformation” the leading short-term risk to the globe for the second-straight year, “underlining their persistent threat to societal cohesion and governance by eroding trust and exacerbating divisions within and between nations.”
Two days after his inauguration, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, released the “Priorities and Mission of the Second Trump Administration’s Department of State.” The short document included the charge that Foggy Bottom “must stop censorship and suppression of information.” Rubio continued:
The State Department’s efforts to combat malign propaganda have expanded and fundamentally changed since the Cold War era and we must reprioritize truth. The State Department I lead will support and defend Americans’ rights to free speech, terminating any programs that in any way lead to censoring the American people.
It is not yet known whether and to what extent Rubio’s approach will affect the reorganized successor to the State Department’s recently shuttered Global Engagement Center, whose efforts defenders had called essential to combating foreign propaganda. Critics have dismissed the reorganization — of an office that funded entities targeting disfavored domestic speech — as an effort to simply rebrand and persist.
The State Department did not respond to RealClearInvestigation’s inquiries in connection with this story.
A vast, well-funded network
The global “counter-disinformation” ecosystem encompasses research centers at top academic institutions and think tanks, fact-checkers, news raters, and like-minded for-profits — often funded or promoted by government agencies and powerful foundations, and operating and seeking to influence governments both stateside and across the Atlantic.
RealClearInvestigations, which recently previewed the censorship fight, emailed questions to other United States agencies and departments believed to be involved, directly or indirectly, in speech suppression on social media or otherwise likely to have a role in implementing the order.
These included the Department of Justice and the FBI; the Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security sub-agency; Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services; National Science Foundation; and Office of Management and Budget.
“The Department of Defense will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the executive orders issued by the president, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives,” a Pentagon official told RCI. The department has previously come under fire for providing funding to news rating entities like NewsGuard seen by critics as biased against conservative and independent outlets.
A National Science Foundation spokesman told RCI that the agency was “reviewing all the executive orders carefully and implementing them accordingly.” In a December 2024 report, the House Judiciary Committee asserted that the foundation had “poured millions of taxpayer-funded grant dollars into the development of AI-powered tools to mass monitor and censor online content.”
Several departments did not respond to RCI’s inquiries. Others referred questions to the White House. It did not respond.
Even as the new administration seeks to end government and government-supported censorship efforts, the more controversial part of Trump’s executive order may be its directive to identify those who quelled speech in the past.
The directive calls on the attorney general and other executive department and agency heads to probe federal government activities violative of the order that took place during the Biden years, whereby the administration “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms” and to prepare a report for President Trump “with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.” It is not clear if such remedial actions will include prosecutions.
Dangers ahead?
Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger, founder and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented several plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri — a case that exposed federal collusion with social media companies to suppress disfavored speech — told RCI that Trump’s action did not go far enough.
“The executive order, although very welcome, would have been even more valuable if it had waived qualified immunity for officials at CISA, the FBI, and other relevant agencies for purposes of free speech violations.”
Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia University, offered an opposing view. Abdo wrote in Just Security that any probe of the Biden administration’s actions would be in bad faith, since the order prejudges the prior administration to have engaged in illicit conduct.
“Worse, the report may very well serve as an outlet for the Trump administration’s own censorial desires,” Abdo wrote. “If, for example, the report further targets researchers engaged in First Amendment protected research, then the administration will be doing exactly what it has accused the Biden administration of doing.”
The House Judiciary Committee is poised to undertake a complementary effort this session. A spokesman told RCI the panel “will continue its oversight work of the Department of Justice and the FBI, in addition to investigating the threat foreign censorship laws pose to American speech.”
The role of law
Trump has previously called for enacting “new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end-run around the Constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights.”
To that end, the Judiciary Committee spokesperson told RCI that the panel would “move quickly to reintroduce legislation that will protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, such as the Censorship Accountability Act and the No Censors on our Shores Act.” The former would provide a right of action against federal employees for First Amendment violations. The latter would render any foreign official who engages in censorship of American speech inadmissible and deportable.
In the Senate, two days after the release of President Trump’s order, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul reintroduced the “Free Speech Protection Act.”
Consistent with the executive order, the legislation aims to bar federal employees from directing platforms to censor protected speech and prohibit grants “relating to programming on misinformation or disinformation.” It also imposes penalties on those who violate the law, including disciplinary action, a civil penalty of not less than $10,000, ineligibility for retirement benefits, and permanent revocation of any applicable security clearance. The bill would also allow those who believe their rights have been violated to bring a civil action against the allegedly offending agency and employee who committed the violation.
“Americans are free people, and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression,” Sen. Paul wrote in reintroducing the bill.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
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The stupidity of online discourse
There’s an online game I find myself playing way too much of, and I hate it. I would love to never play this game again, but its existence is a consequence of the deep structure of social media, so if I’m going to argue about things on the internet, then playing it is unavoidable.
I call this game, “Where Is the Discourse?” It goes something like this:
By the time they get to move #4 in this game, the debate has shifted entirely from a fight over the merits of the argument Alice sought to refute to a squabble over whether or not this specific list of individuals is representative of any larger group, movement, or way of thinking.
In other words, Alice and Bob are now fighting over the location of the Discourse. Where is it? Who is and is not a participant in it? Which bylines, institutional affiliations, follower counts, or engagement metrics qualify an individual as a bona fide participant in the Discourse?
Back in the bad old days of media monopolies, everyone knew where the Discourse was. If you had a local monopoly on one or more scarce channels of distribution — a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, newsstand, library shelf space, or print facilities plus a fleet of delivery vehicles — then you were definitionally a site of the Discourse and could gatekeep who participated and who did not.
But now that everyone with smartphone access has the ability to publish text, images, sound, and video instantly for the entire planet to see, our society has collectively lost track of the location of the Discourse in the space of about a decade and a half. No new discursive Schelling point has emerged to replace the now-dead radio, TV, and print monopolies. We are adrift.
Perhaps the most corrosive effect of “Where Is the Discourse?” on our collective intellectual life is the way it reduces even the loftiest issues down to petty fights over credentials.
I’m reminded of the adage, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” The discourse game, then, is a powerful mechanism for turning every discussion of ideas into a discussion of people, thereby shrinking the mind of each player by two sizes.