President Donald Trump has ordered his attorney general to investigate how the previous administration “trampled on the right to free speech” in seeking to combat misinformation on social media platforms.
The directive, which came amid a wave of executive orders on Trump’s first day in office, prohibits government agencies and employees from restricting free speech – something already prohibited by the First Amendment – and states that the federal government should “identify and take appropriate action to correct past federal misconduct related to censorship of protected speech.”
It’s the latest sign that restrictions around online misinformation are likely to evaporate over the next four years, as the new administration battles perceived anti-conservative bias on social media and leaders of the technology sector are getting closer to a president who has tI threatened to throw away at least one of them – Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg – is in prison for life.
On Monday, Zuckerberg was joined by X owner Elon Musk and Google CEO Sundar Pichai at Trump’s inauguration. Technology leaders had helped to pay for the festivities of the day, races to write million-dollar checks to Trump’s inaugural committee. And in the weeks before the new administration took office, Meta was particularly aggressive in embracing Trump, announcing the end of fact check And diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have long fueled allegations of far-right bias.
Research has largely refuted these claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms. A university in New York study found that conservative-leaning posts on Facebook tended to outperform liberal-leaning posts. And a recent article in Nature concluded that even if pro-Trump users were more likely having been suspended from Twitter during the 2020 election, they were also much more likely to share links from low-quality news sources that likely violated the platform’s misinformation policies.
In 2023, a group of Republican attorneys general and social media users sued the Biden administration, alleging that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other executive agencies colluded with social media platforms to suppress free speech by reporting posts containing COVID misinformation. -19 pandemic and election integrity. A conservative federal district court and an appeals court both sided with the attorneys general and issued a ruling preliminary injunction prohibit federal agencies from reporting content to social media companies or encouraging them to remove content.
But in June 2024, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court rejected this preliminary injunction. Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the content restrictions on their accounts were caused by the government. Rather, “platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment,” she wrote.