United States President-elect Donald Trump is about to take office, and while much attention has been paid to his views on immigration, abortion rights and democracy, less attention has been paid to how he might threaten internet freedoms.
His appointments to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other government agencies appear bent on censoring Internet speech and generally making the Internet less free than it has been in years past, tech experts warn.
One of the more famous people who could pose a threat to freedom of speech on the Internet is Brendan Carr. Currently the commissioner of the FCC, which regulates the media, Trump chose Carr to lead the agency. Carr styled himself as a critic of big tech, and while the president-elect called him a “warrior for free speech,” Carr has targeted speech on the Internet in the past.
“They’re going to try to turn the FCC into the online speech police,” Evan Greer, director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told Al Jazeera.
In a proposed right-wing guide to governing the incoming administration known as Project 2025a section written by Carr on the FCC advocates repealing “the current Section 230 approach.” Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from liability for user posts and allows companies to moderate those posts. In Project 2025, Carr argued that Section 230 should have “fundamental” reforms, including restrictions on companies’ ability to moderate or remove posts that reflect “fundamental political views.”
In letters to social media companies, he also accused fact-checking services of being part of a “censorship cartel” and warned that the new Republican Congress and administration would “reexamine” social media actions that “restricted” [free speech] rights”.
“He’s made it abundantly clear that he intends to use the FCC’s power for targeted ‘big tech censorship,’ by which he means punishing any tech company that doesn’t promote right-wing propaganda to his personal satisfaction,” said Mary Anne Franks, a professor of intellectual property. in Technology and Civil Rights Law from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
In the past, Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of news networks he felt were not “acting in the public interest,” including CBS after it aired an interview with Trump’s presidential opponent Kamala Harris that Trump criticized. While he presented himself as a supporter of free speech, he also appears to have supported censorship of speech that the new administration disliked.
As for the FTC, whose purpose is to protect consumers, Trump has chosen Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency. Ferguson is also seen as a threat to internet freedoms. He believes big tech companies have censored conservative speech and wants to use his power to push back.
Ferguson wants to use antitrust law to attack these companies, and has claimed that, as head of the FTC, he will help the Trump administration “remove uncooperative bureaucrats.” That could mean getting rid of key career civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists.
“Ferguson is really singing a lot of the same tune with a slightly different set of authorities,” said Matt Wood, general counsel and vice president of policy at the nonprofit group Free Press.
Ferguson has made it clear that he would use the FTC to search for online speech related to gender-affirming care, LGBTQ issues and abortion, Greer told Al Jazeera.
Experts and free speech advocates have warned that both candidates appear to want to use the power they would have to elevate conservative voices and suppress voices they disagree with.
“There’s also Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, another proponent of the ‘conservative censorship’ myth and who has a track record of aggressively attacking social media companies and other entities that try to uphold minimum anti-discrimination standards,” he said. is Franks.
Dhillon, a lawyer and conservative activist, defended a Google employee accused of sexism who was fired during the first Trump administration after he wrote a memo suggesting that, due to biological differences, women were less effective programmers.
As head of the Civil Rights Division, Dhillon could pursue tech companies, potentially through lawsuits, for allegedly violating conservatives’ civil liberties and could cause those companies to allow more offensive or threatening speech on their platforms aimed at minorities and the left and less speech that is critical of the incoming administration. Indeed, at the time he announced his choice, Trump praised Dhillon for taking on Big Tech and for “suing corporations that use wake policies.”
“Come on” after the journalists
In addition to these nominees, there are people who will advise Trump, such as the world’s richest man Elon Musk and his friend tech billionaire David Sacks, who supported Musk during his takeover of Twitter. They are also known for promoting the idea of censoring conservative voices on the Internet, and are fierce opponents of liberal ideology.
Many First Amendment experts worry that Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel, a former public defender and Trump loyalist, will go after reporters the administration dislikes if he is confirmed. In fact, he repeatedly said he would do just that while on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s podcast. This could also be an issue of internet freedom because he could use a vast nation state of surveillance to do this.
“At a certain point, it’s almost hard to separate our digital rights from our physical rights,” Greer said.
It could be argued that one’s online freedoms are limited when they are under surveillance because they are then unable to act freely without fear of reprisal. This creates a situation where people are more inclined to self-censor.
During the first Trump administration, for example, the government monitored the social media profiles of Black Lives Matter activists, raising concerns about their ability to freely express their political opinions online.
The attacks can be seen as part of what Wood called the administration’s “broader assault on free speech,” including Trump’s threats, like Carr’s, to revoke the broadcast licenses of news corporations that report news in ways he doesn’t like.
It is not clear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be approved by the Senate when they come up for a vote in the coming weeks, but what is clear is that many of them share similar ideals and could fundamentally change or limit freedom of expression online.
