WATCH: How Trump plans to take on censorship

The incoming Trump administration scored an early but possibly illusory victory last month in its effort to reform government overreach when it successfully pressured Congress to eliminate what it termed “sweetheart provisions for government censors” from a measure to stave off a government shutdown.

Funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – which Republicans had attacked as a tool of domestic censorship – was stripped from the final bill, and the center announced that it was closed for good on Dec. 23. Days later, however, reporting emerged that the State Department had devised plans to shift the center’s 51 employees and millions of dollars of funding to a separate hub purportedly to counter foreign “information manipulation and interference.”

President-elect Donald Trump has not said how he will respond to this maneuver. But in extensive public comments he has said that targeting what critics have called the Censorship Industrial Complex will be a high priority in his new administration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to restore free expression on his platforms and join the Trump administration in its efforts to push back on global censorship, two weeks before inauguration day, indicates speech-policing forces like his may be disarming accordingly.

As the State Department’s move suggests, however, this push will likely face stiff resistance. “There will be a visceral reaction from the bureaucratic state in permanent Washington,” Sen. Eric Schmitt told RealClearInvestigations. As attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt launched the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against federal government collusion with social media companies and nonprofits to target disfavored speech.

Trump outlined the steps he might pursue in a December 2022 video detailing his “Free Speech Policy Initiative” – a video that, ironically, received less attention originally because YouTube had banned the former president. Responding to what he called “a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” that have “conspire[d] to manipulate and silence the American People … [and] collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health,” Trump vowed to “dismantle and destroy” the “censorship cartel,” including through the use of vigorous executive action starting within hours of his inauguration.

According to the Free Speech Policy Initiative, his administration’s efforts will include:

• A first-day executive order barring federal authorities from colluding with others to abridge Americans’ protected speech
• Preventing federal dollars from being used to classify domestic speech as mis- or dis-information, and from being lavished on nonprofits and academic institutions engaging in similar efforts, including “flagging” posts to social media platforms for suppression
• Identifying and firing bureaucrats across the federal government who have engaged in direct or indirect censorship, while enacting laws imposing criminal penalties on such conduct
• Directing the Department of Justice to probe participants in the “new online censorship regime” for myriad potential violations of law
• Working with Congress to pass legislation modifying Section 230 of the Communications Act to extend its liability shield only to those large online platforms meeting high standards of “neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination”
• Helping to pass a digital Bill of Rights, including a right to due process requiring government officials to obtain a court order to remove online content

“The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America – and for the survival of Western civilization itself,” Trump said in announcing his initiative. “When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left.”

A Sprawling Network

As RealClearInvestigations has reported extensively, a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs have formed a “whole-of-society” partnership aimed at combatting what its constituents consider dangerous “mis-, dis-, and mal-information,” particularly on social media.

Players include counter-disinformation research centers at leading universities and think tanks, fact-checkers and news rating entities, and like-minded for-profits – often funded and/or promoted by government agencies and powerful foundations. Many of these initiatives began in response to perceived threats from abroad. The Global Engagement Center, for example, was created during the Obama administration to combat foreign propaganda and information operations, originally with a focus on terrorist groups. It soon expanded its mission to combat alleged threats in the homeland, using taxpayer dollars to coordinate with counter-disinformation entities that have worked to purge disfavored domestic news and views – including through targeting the business models of U.S. outlets like RealClearPolitics and many others.

Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online asserts that support for such efforts spans 12 different government departments and 50 different government programs, some of which fund related programs at nearly 100 universities under the banner of “disinformation studies” and related disciplines.

Transparency-focused nonprofit OpenTheBooks calculates that the Biden administration has granted roughly $260 million in awards pertaining to “misinformation.”

President Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism codified such efforts. It directed federal authorities to work with “state, local, tribal, and territorial governments and in civil society, the private sector, academia, and local communities, as well as with our allies and foreign partners” to address “the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”

The trial judge in Missouri v. Biden, which would ultimately land at the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, found that this public-private partnership  – kicked off with agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency towards the end of the first Trump administration – engaged in perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” in its efforts to suppress disfavored speech, particularly on election integrity and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Litigation and congressional oversight have exposed the breadth and depth of these activities. Some counter-disinformation entities have, facing public scrutiny, curtailed their work. But the Supreme Court never ruled on the merits of Murthy – finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing – and thereby did not establish that government efforts direct and indirect to press social media companies to suppress protected speech are illegal or unconstitutional. Nor has a divided Congress passed bills prohibiting such activities, defunding them, or penalizing federal officials who might engage in them.

Government-supported nonprofits, often portraying themselves as researchers, including the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, have vowed to continue their work, which they say is pivotal to defending democracy. A spokesperson for the center told RCI that in the face of a threatened reckoning, its personnel “are continuing their work to study how rumors and falsehoods spread online, understand the role of social media platforms and generative AI in shaping those information flows and to educate people about online manipulation, deception and scams.”

From the Center for an Informed Public

Trump and many of his personnel picks so far see these initiatives and collaborations differently. His nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has said one of his “top priorities” is to “smash the censorship cartel.”

Under Section 230 of the Communications Act, which falls under the FCC’s purview, social media platforms have been deemed immune from civil liability for taking down certain types of content “in good faith.” Carr recently argued that this provision has been used to “silence divergent speech” and indicated that under his leadership, the commission may “look at implementing that in a way that can promote more speech.” He has also suggested that given that “a cohort of advertising and marketing agencies have been working together … to collude to crack down on free speech,” this might constitute unlawful anti-competitive behavior for his agency to consider.

Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, called last month for a range of investigative and enforcement actions to “bust … up” “anti-competitive cartels that facilitate or promote censorship.”

Carr and Ferguson alike have both cited NewsGuard as a key player in online censorship. As RealClearInvestigations has reported previously, NewsGuard rates the trustworthiness of websites on a zero to 100 scale based on their staffers’ review of samples of work according to certain criteria. Those subjective ratings attach to sites when one searches them in a browser equipped with NewsGuard’s extension. What’s more, under the banner of “brand safety,” NewsGuard licenses “exclusion lists” of low-rated sources to advertisers to instruct their ad agencies and ad-tech partners to keep their programmatic ads off those sites – starving them of pivotal ad revenue. Evidence suggests NewsGuard disfavors conservative or independent-leaning outlets. Congressional scrutiny and reportage have revealed that NewsGuard has been a recipient of funding from both the defunct Global Engagement Center and the Department of Defense – though it disputes this characterization.

In November, prior to his appointment as FCC commissioner, Carr sent a letter to Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, soliciting information regarding the Big Tech companies’ ties to NewsGuard. Citing its purported biases and noting the for-profit’s partnerships with web browsers and social media companies, Carr suggested that should the firms be relying on NewsGuard’s offerings, such activities might violate the “good faith” standard upon which their Section 230 immunity shield relies.

Ferguson noted in his December statement that while “NewsGuard is … free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants … antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors.”

NewsGuard has challenged Carr’s premises. In a statement, co-CEO Gordon Crovitz, formerly the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, said that the incoming FCC Commissioner’s letter relied on “unreliable sources,” maintained that “we provide users with apolitical reliability analysis,” and otherwise challenged claims of bias and censoriousness. After Crovitz and co-founder CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, penned a subsequent rejoinder to Carr, Brill would write in Politico that “I felt like taking a shower after trying to defend my journalism to a threatening regulator, pleading with him to believe that I’m fair.”

In response to a question regarding NewsGuard’s view of the Trump administration’s coming efforts, General Manager Matt Skibinski reiterated the arguments in NewsGuard’s responses to Carr, telling RCI: “We agree that the government should not engage in censorship and that the social media companies should be more transparent. We founded NewsGuard as the apolitical, fully transparent alternative to either government censorship or social media secretly rating news sources and claims.”

Other Trump administration officials likewise seem poised to help the president implement the Free Speech Policy Initiative.

The Office of Management and Budget is likely to be a key hub of such activity. It has broad powers to help the president implement his policies, including in its oversight of executive agencies, clearing of executive orders, review of regulations, and developing of the president’s budget.

President Trump’s nominee for deputy director of the agency, departing North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop, wrote this month that “the days of the Censorship Industrial Complex are numbered.”

Others who have expressed aversion to social media company efforts to target disfavored speech include Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – who will be working hand-in-hand with the Office of Management and Budget through the soon-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency – and AI czar David Sacks.

Two additional picks have found themselves targeted by social media companies for censorship: Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health Director-designate Jay Bhattacharya. Fighting back, they are both plaintiffs in cases against federal agencies.

Obstacles

Foundation for Freedom Online founder Benz warned in a recent interview on the Joe Rogan podcast that the White House is “going to run into a lot of headwinds” given the size, scope, and scale of the “censorship industry.”

Benz, who worked in cyber policy during President Trump’s first term, suggested resistance would come from the State Department, where he served, and the Defense Department. These agencies, he asserted, will claim they must maintain counter-disinformation capacities to combat foreign threats – capacities that critics say have been trained instead on Americans.

“Trump is going to run into every single regional desk at the State Department, every single equity at the Pentagon, arguing that if you do not allow us to continue this censorship work it will undermine national security.”

“You’re going to have the State Department argue that if we don’t have this counter misinformation capacity, then extremists will win elections around the world or populists will win the election around the world. And that will undermine the power of our democratic institutions,” Benz told Rogan.

Whether and to what extent Congress will seek to codify the president’s efforts in legislation remains an open question.

House Republicans in the last Congress sought to advance legislation to prohibit federal funds from directly or indirectly being used to target Americans’ protected speech; punish federal officials who would collude with third parties or social media companies to censor speech; and prohibit foreign officials targeting Americans’ speech from traveling to America.

Those efforts languished.

Speaker Mike Johnson, in a statement upon passage of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, touted leadership’s efforts to “prohibit contracts with advertising firms that blacklist conservative news sources, like NewsGuard Technologies Inc.”

That the Global Engagement Center’s extension made it into the original December stopgap spending bill suggested otherwise. Johnson’s office defended its inclusion by noting that the speaker had “killed multiple efforts to pass a 5-year reauthorization of the GEC during the past year.” It added that the original measure ensured that the incoming administration would have the “maximum ability and authority to determine how to handle the office, its authorities, and funding.”

Neither House nor Senate leaders, Republican or Democrat, responded to RCI’s questions in connection with this story.

Sen. Rand Paul, the new chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has indicated he would like to end the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Reports suggest he is likely to face bipartisan resistance. Acknowledging that termination is unlikely, “at the very least,” he has said, he would like to “eliminate their ability to censor content online.”

Last Congress, Sen. Paul introduced the “Free Speech Protection Act,” which would bar federal employees from directing social media platforms to censor protected speech. That legislation sat dormant.

Sen. Schmitt, a co-sponsor of the bill, recently introduced legislation in the Transparency in Communications Act that would force inspectors general, tasked with overseeing the federal bureaucracy, to provide “a comprehensive reporting of all communications on content moderation, user content, and … companies’ algorithms” between federal agencies and Big Tech companies.

Asked whether he anticipated there might be bipartisan resistance to legislative remedies to purported public-private censorship efforts, given, for example, some Republicans’ support of extending the life of the Global Engagement Center, Sen. Schmitt replied: “I would hope not.”

“I think it’s wrong to think of this as a Democrat vs. Republican thing,” Schmitt said. “I’ve been saying this from the beginning, coercive censorship like what we witnessed by the Biden Administration should scare the hell out of every American, regardless of political affiliation. We will need legitimate buy-in from all Republicans to dismantle this vast censorship enterprise built by Joe Biden and the administrative state.”

Reports suggest that those in the counter-disinformation effort are spooked by the Trump administration’s policies.

RCI reached out to notable players in connection with this story with inquiries regarding their perspectives on the Trump administration’s Free Speech Policy Initiative, its likely impacts, and how they and their peers intend to respond to it.

NewsGuard’s Skibinski disputed a suggestion that it was part of any “ecosystem,” adding “we plan simply to continue our apolitical work.”

The Global Disinformation Index, like NewsGuard, has tended to rank conservative and independent outlets as “risky” spreaders of mis- and disinformation and provided “exclusion lists” to ad tech companies and others with the intent of drying up those outlets’ funding. It, too, has received U.S. government funding. The British-based nonprofit did not respond to RCI’s inquiries.

Nina Jankowicz, who was to lead the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board, scrapped under criticism it was to represent an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth,” co-wrote an October piece asserting that amid congressional scrutiny of counter-disinformation initiatives: “Regardless of the outcome of the November election, there is a clear and present danger facing anyone seeking to make the internet a safer place – both inside and outside US borders.”

Jankowicz now heads the American Sunlight Project, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that exists to “increase the cost of lies that undermine our democracy.” It did not respond to RCI’s inquiries.

Nor did the Center for Democracy & Technology, a prominent proponent of “counter-disinformation initiatives.”

The Complex That Wouldn’t Die

Irrespective of what happens at the federal level, critics fear that foreign and state authorities may fill the vacuum.

As RCI has previously reported, evidence suggests that global legal and regulatory standards may serve as a backdoor method to suppress protected speech at home.

Citing efforts from Europe to Latin America and China to pressure American social media platforms to censor, Meta’s Zuckerberg said in his Jan. 7 announcement of coming free speech-focused reforms that “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world.”

Benz and others have warned that states may seek to pass laws abridging protected American speech on social media as a way to bypass federal resistance.

Elon Musk and X filed suit against California’s AB 2655, which proponents describe as a “flagship anti-disinformation law.”

According to a summary of the law, large online platforms would be required to “block the posting of materially deceptive content related to elections in California” and “label certain additional content inauthentic, fake or false” during periods around elections.

Musk and X contend in their suit that the “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Protection Act of 2024” would result in the “censorship of wide swaths of valuable political speech and commentary and will limit the type of ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open’ ‘debate on public issues’ that core First Amendment protections are designed to ensure.”

A similar bill is working its way through Michigan’s legislature. A federal judge has for now halted a parallel California law, AB 2839, prohibiting the distribution of deceptive content pertaining to candidates around elections, on the ground that it may violate the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, maneuvering by the State Department to mitigate the effects of the GEC’s closure by reassigning its employees to engage in similar work indicates the resistance the Trump administration is likely to face.

In response to the news, Sen. Schmitt posted on X: “Biden & the Dems are continuing their push to censor American voices, even in Biden’s final hours. Less than 20 days until Trump comes & roots out this madness.”