President Trump appears on a large screen during his address by video conference at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
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Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
Among the dozens of executive actions President Trump signed on his first day in office is one aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Legal and political experts say it raises concerns about the new administration’s willingness to punish its perceived enemies, such as civil servants and researchers who study how propaganda and conspiracy theories travel online.
The order bars the government from “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen” and directs the attorney general to investigate the Biden administration’s activities and recommend “remedial actions.”
“No longer will our government label the speech of our own citizens as misinformation or disinformation, which are the favorite words of censors and those who wish to stop the free exchange of ideas and, frankly, progress,” Trump said on Thursday during a speech to the World Economic Forum. “We have saved free speech in America, and we’ve saved it strongly with another historic executive order.”
The First Amendment already prohibits the government from restricting a wide range of speech. But in recent years, Republicans, including Trump and his allies, have accused federal officials of colluding with social media companies and disinformation researchers to unlawfully censor speech, especially around contentious issues, including elections and public health. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected claims that social media companies had been pressured by the government to take down posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
Despite that ruling, the first section of the executive order accuses the Biden administration of having “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.”
The new executive order is “part of an argument that the right has been making for a long time about the government working against conservatives, social media working against conservatives,” said David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.
There are no specifics of what the “remedial actions” the order refers to would look like. Kaye said that this vagueness can be useful.
“Once you have an executive order, it is a source of authority for individual policymakers to take action,” he said. “Maybe internally there will be debate over the meaning of the order. But whoever has control … will have the power to do that.”
The censorship order isn’t the only directive from Trump that could open the door for officials to punish civil servants. Another order titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” directs the attorney general to “review the activities” of federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, for things like prosecuting people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Trump’s executive orders are similar to moves by those in power in Hungary and Poland said, Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political science professor at Stanford University who studies populism around the world.
“A favorite tactic is to purge state employees and then rehire political allies,” she said. “[It’s] a classic pattern that we see all over the world pursued by illiberal, autocratically minded, populist governments.”
In a statement, the White House told NPR that nothing in the orders should be “remotely objectionable to anyone who believes in the First Amendment and rule of law.” It did not specify a timeline for the reviews referred to in the orders or what “remedial actions” could look like.
The censorship narrative had an impact before the executive order
The censorship executive order also bars the use of “taxpayer resources” to carry out what it defines as censoring speech. That could put further pressure on researchers, who have also been targeted by the ongoing Republican legal and political campaign casting efforts to mitigate or track the spread of falsehoods online as “censorship.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, attends the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20.
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The House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee, chaired by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and established in early 2023, has conducted investigations into government agencies, social media companies and researchers of false and harmful narratives online, driven by the idea that these organizations colluded to censor conservative speech.
The subcommittee produced reports alleging that the Biden administration worked with tech platforms, nonprofits and academic researchers to build a “censorship-industrial complex” that colluded to stifle conservative viewpoints online.
Research does not support those claims. Top conservative influencers have bigger followings than top liberal influencers, and far-right accounts get more engagement on Facebook than accounts of other political persuasion. While conservatives are more likely to spread information that fact-checkers deem inaccurate, there’s no available data to substantiate the allegation that conservatives are unfairly targeted by fact-checkers.
Still, following the subpoenas by the subcommittee and multiple lawsuits from conservative groups, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one prominent research group tracking abusive online speech, lost its leadership and much of its staff and stopped studying election-related false narratives.
“What we [are seeing] is right-wing efforts to disrupt research that the right sees as challenging its dominance on social media, reframed as being somehow anti-disinformation research. It’s really anti-criticism,” said Renée DiResta, who previously worked as a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and was cast as a censorship figurehead by right-wing media. She now studies adversarial online abuse at Georgetown University.
For Darren Linvill, who co-leads Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, concerns about partisan pressure on research have been growing for years. When the COVID-19 pandemic and the conspiracy theories that came with it swept the United States, he said, researchers in the field started to worry about the field being politicized. Three years later, he was called in front of Jordan’s subcommittee to testify.
“A lot of the funding agencies have already responded to the partisan battle by backing off from funding this kind of work,” Linvill said.
He said he’s no longer pursuing government funding that’s traditionally used for academic research. When he did apply for government funding, Linvill avoided ideas that he thought carried too much political risk.
“I would bet a lot of money we’re not the only organization that has engaged in some self-censorship. … People understand the reality that they’re dealing with, just like the funding agencies understand the reality,” he said.
Social media companies have also responded to the pressure. Many have laid off staff working on trust and safety. In January, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta stopped fact-checking in the U.S. and said it would dial back filtering out content its own policies deem harmful.
