President Donald Trump has ordered his attorney general to investigate how previous administrations have “trampled on free speech rights” by seeking to crack down on falsehoods on social media.
The order, which came amid a flurry of executive orders on Trump’s first day in office, prohibits federal agencies and employees from curtailing free speech — something already prohibited by the First Amendment — and says the federal government must “identify and take appropriate action to correct past wrongful conduct by the federal government related to the examination of protected speech.” .”
It’s the latest sign that restrictions on online disinformation are likely to tighten over the next four years as new administrations battle against perceived bias against social media and tech executives approach a president who has threatened to throw at least one—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg—in prison for life.
On Monday, Zuckerberg was joined by X owner Elon Musk and Google CEO Sundar Pichai at Trump’s inauguration. Tech executives had helped pay for the day’s festivities, rushing to write Trump’s first committee $1 million in checks. And in the weeks leading up to the new administration’s takeover, Meta has been especially aggressive in kissing the Trump ring, announcing an end to fact-checking and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that have long fueled far-right claims of bias.
Research has widely refuted those allegations of bias against environmental protection in social media. A New York University study found that focused posts on Facebook tend to outperform liberal posts. And a recent article in Nature concluded that while pro-Trump users may have been banned from Twitter during the 2020 election, they were more likely to share links from low-quality media outlets that may have violated the platform’s misinformation policies.
In 2023, a group of Republican state lawmakers and social media users sued the Biden administration alleging that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top agencies colluded with social media to suppress free speech by flagging posts containing false information about COVID. -19 pandemic and election integrity. A successive federal district court and appeals court both sided with the attorneys general and issued a preliminary injunction barring federal agencies from flagging the content of social media companies or encouraging them to remove content.
But in June 2024, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court struck down that original law. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that the plaintiffs failed to show that the restrictions on the content of their accounts were created by the government. Instead, “the platforms had independent motivations for content moderation and often used their own judgment,” he wrote.