On Monday President Donald Trump signed an executive order that ensures no federal government official facilitates conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen, reports Joe Lauria.
Trump signing executive orders in Washington on Monday. (Trump White House/Wikimedia Commons)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
President Donald Trump in his inaugural speech on Monday vowed to end online censorship by government using social media companies as proxies.
He said:
“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.”
Later on Monday Trump signed the executive order, “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship, which reads:
“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.
Over the last 4 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.
Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society. ”
The executive order sets out to:
(a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;
(c) ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; and
(d) identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.
Significantly, the EO says the “Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of executive departments and agencies, shall investigate the activities of the Federal Government over the last 4 years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies of this order.”
Background to the Order
According to the Twitter Files, the Biden administration ramped up federal agencies such as Homeland Security and the F.B.I. to pressure social media companies like Twitter to remove tweets or suspend user accounts because the federal government determined they had posted “mis” or “disinformation.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled more once, most recently in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo(2024), that it is illegal for the government to use a private actor as a proxy to suppress free speech. The Biden administration acted mostly against conservatives online, but left-wing critics of the Democrats were also targeted.
Social media companies were often uncomfortable with the intense pressure they were under from the government to censor their users. For instance, files reported on by Matt Taibbi show Twitter executives internally debating how they could ignore government pressure.
Zuckerberg testifies before Congress, April 2018. (Cspan.org screeshot)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in August 2022 that the F.B.I. warned him about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 election and based on that Facebook made it difficult to share the story. “When we take down something that we’re not supposed to, that’s the worst,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
More than 50 former U.S. intelligence officers falsely issued a statement saying the laptop story was “Russian propaganda.” Based on that, Twitter not only blocked posts about it, but suspended The New York Post’s account as it was the Post that broke the story.
The mainstream media later admitted the laptop story was real. The laptop gave evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s shady business deals and was not Russian disinformation. Tampering with the story’s reach was a clear case of “election interference” by pro-Democratic forces as opposed to their own phony allegations of Russian electoral interference in 2016 and 2020.
Just before Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg announced that he would be ending third-party fact-checking on Facebook. Zuckerberg admitted this month that, “We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.”
“Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said.
“Fact-checking” and the “anti-disiformation” cottage industry sprung up in the wake of Trump’s initially shocking 2016 victory. It sought to discredit criticism of the fake Russiagate scandal that ensnared Trump in a conspiracy theory which claimed Trump won because he was a Kremlin agent.
These fact checkers and overnight disinformation “experts” helped this story become fanatically embraced by Democratic media and millions of Americans. They moved on to focus on other so-called “disinformation,” mostly connected to Russia.
These so-called experts extended their dragnet to independent media and social media users who questioned Russiagate and other mainstream narratives.
Independent media outlets, including Consortium News, were essentially accused of spreading Russian propaganda because of its legitimate criticism of U.S. Russia policy, especially Washington’s provocation of Moscow in Ukraine.
A Louisiana judge on July 4, 2023 banned a number of Biden administration officials from communicating with social media companies because of the Twitter files revelations.
The case of Missouri v. Biden was eventually dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2024, which ruled that the states of Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing to bring the action against the federal government.
Trump’s executive order would appear to overcome that ruling.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former 25-year U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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