The Trump administration has vowed to root out Big Tech censorship that was openly practiced under former President Joe Biden.
In 2021, Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki—now a host for MSNBC—admitted that the government coordinated with Big Tech to weed out “misinformation” on social media platforms.
“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team,” Psaki said at a 2021 press conference. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since said that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan in January. “It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’”
While government coordination with Big Tech companies to censor Americans may be gone under President Donald Trump, the censorship problem remains.
In early February, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into Big Tech. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson announced that the agency would be looking into attempts by tech companies to censor on their platforms.
“Big Tech censorship is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal. The FTC wants your help to investigate these potential violations of the law,” he wrote.
Big Tech companies should not be “bullying their users,” Ferguson said, “this inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”
Ferguson asked for public cooperation “from anyone who has been a victim of tech censorship (banning, demonetization, shadow banning, etc.), from employees of tech platforms, or from anyone else who can shed light on these practices and the ways in which they may violate the law.”
The FTC said in a statement that the agency is interested in “understanding how consumers—including by potentially unfair or deceptive acts or practices, or potentially unfair methods of competition—have been harmed by the policies of tech firms.”
The FTC directed Americans with a complaint about Big Tech censorship to submit a comment to the agency by May 21.
Heritage Action for America created a portal to direct a comment to the agency that can be accessed here. Once the comment period is over the comments will be posted at Regulations.gov.
Heritage Action included some helpful tips for what to include in a comment to the FTC.
- What platform censored you?
- How were you censored? (E.g., Labeled as misinformation? Content removed? Shadow banned? Demonetized? etc…)
- What was the impact on you, your family, employees, friends, or followers/clients?
- Did the platform tell you about their action to censor you? And did they provide a reasonable and specific explanation?
- Did the platform give you the option to appeal the censorship? What was the result?
Last week, Trump made an additional move to quash the censorship of Americans. He proposed in his budget request eliminating the disinformation offices and programs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
“CISA was more focused on cooperating with Big Tech to target free speech than our nation’s critical systems,” the White House said in an “Ending Weaponization of the Federal Government” fact sheet, adding the agency’s disinformation offices “functioned as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex.”
