Trump’s FTC chair shifts focus from consumer protection to culture wars

In Andrew Ferguson’s pitch to become chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), he presented himself as an “America First” pick for President Donald Trump, vowing to fight the “trans agenda,” end wokeness, and punish “censorship” by social media platforms.

Now in charge at the agency, his use of a unique regulatory tool—public comment periods—shows how the Republican agency head plans to follow through on his promises.

One of Ferguson’s first acts as chair was to close five existing requests for public comments, spanning topics like predatory pricing, worker exploitation, and mergers and acquisitions. 

Then, last month, he launched a public inquiry into “tech censorship,” insinuating social media companies are silencing some users (conservatives) for their political views. 

“Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” Ferguson said in a statement, as he opened the comment period for everyday consumers. “This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”

Inquiries like this one sometimes go nowhere. But others presage reports, investigations, and even enforcement actions against specific companies or business practices. 

Ferguson’s focus on buzzy culture war issues, particularly online speech, is a sign of changing priorities at the FTC, which had been hyperfocused on antitrust and consumer protection under Ferguson’s predecessor, Lina Khan, but now appears more interested in wielding power against the right’s perceived enemies. 

If the more than 1,200 public comments are any indication, Ferguson’s censorship inquiry has succeeded in giving aggrieved conservatives a voice. 

“I was banned by Facebook several years ago because I was sharing Pro-Trump meme after the stolen 2020 election,” wrote a commenter Teresa Kaminski. “Not that I care any longer. Facebook is a communist trash site stealing people's data and selling it.”

“Please beware that I was banned for supporting Trump and being a conservative on Reddit,” another commenter, Chris Crowder, claimed. “This is a dangerous site and needs to be heavily looked into.” 

Social media’s perceived liberal bias has been a right-wing rallying cry for years, particularly after YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter banned Trump from their platforms for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. 

The public comment request even got a boost from the r/conservative subreddit, where users urged each other to “submit censorship receipts.”

These comments will likely result in a report from the Republican-led FTC after the comment period closes, said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Future Foundation. From there, the agency can use commenters' experiences to inform investigations, rulemaking, and other regulatory actions. 

Other Americans don’t like the change in focus, though, and they are letting the FTC know. 

“You know this investigation is without merit and retaliatory only,” wrote a commenter named Summer Oram. “Please stand up for all of America, and against politicized drama.”

“Please adhere to the original mission of the FTC, to protect American consumers from the profit-taking of big business,” added Dawn Newcomer, another commenter.

Those commenters are correct that pouring resources into cultural battles necessarily means taking resources away from genuine antitrust and consumer protection work, said Berin Szóka, president of the nonpartisan think tank TechFreedom. 

The FTC takes in millions of consumer complaints about potentially illicit business activities each year through a general tip line that is separate from topic-specific comment periods. 

In 2024, the top categories were imposter scams, credit card identity theft, and complaints about credit bureaus. 

These complaints align more closely with the inquiries Ferguson closed, such as one on surveillance pricing, which involves online retailers customizing prices based on granular consumer data. Democratic commissioners such as Khan connected the practice to cost-of-living challenges everyday Americans face in a time of still-elevated inflation.

“Those are the things that they're not going to be able to handle because they're wasting time and energy and resources on this,” Szóka argued. 

On Wednesday, FTC attorney Jonathan Cohen, revealed the depths of the agency’s limitations while asking for a delay in a case against Amazon. 

“Our resource constraints are severe and really unique to this moment,” Cohen told a federal court. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on the case team.”

Experts also unanimously agreed that the FTC doesn’t have the authority to punish companies for content policies that Ferguson dislikes. 

But the new chair seems determined to bring content policy within the agency’s purview. 

He framed the inquiry around bread-and-butter FTC anticompetition enforcement, citing concerns about “potentially unfair or deceptive acts or practices, or potentially unfair methods of competition,” though it’s unclear how this argument would hold up in the face of conservatives starting competitors like Rumble, Gab, and Truth Social.

The FTC did not respond to an interview request to explain the rationale behind the new inquiry or its closure of the comment periods more easily linked to competition enforcement. That said, the rationale is plain enough to tech policy experts. 

Leaders throughout the administration have pushed big tech companies and their allies to drop any semblance of left-leaning policy, including independent moderation of hate speech and misinformation.

In February, new FCC chair Brendan Carr wrote to the executives of eight big tech firms decrying what he said was an “unprecedented surge in censorship.” In the letter, he praised X and Meta for gutting the independent content moderation teams that conservatives revile and implementing community notes instead.

The FTC, though, has more tools at its disposal than the FCC to actually punish companies for perceived anticompetitive practices. In the Amazon case, for instance, the agency is seeking an injunction to fundamentally change the retail giant’s pricing and search practices. 

After years of Republicans criticizing Khan for what they saw as her overstepping the FTC’s statutory authority, Ferguson appears poised to do the same thing.

“Agency heads don't necessarily seem to be all that concerned anymore with what they have the legal authority to do,” said Ari Cohn, tech policy counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “They're going to try to use whatever tools they have, blunt instruments, to do things that they think are going to make President Trump happy.” 

In this case, waging Trump’s culture wars may mean using valuable agency resources to plunge whichever tech and media companies the Trump administration dislikes into an arcane and burdensome regulatory process. 

The public comment period is just the start, said Szóka, who expects the commission to follow up with requests for internal documents and an administrative adjudication process. Those procedures can take over a year and delay companies from filing lawsuits protecting their content moderation policies on free speech grounds. 

“They have the ability, for a whole bunch of reasons, to torment companies through the process,” Szóka said of the FTC. “The process in FTC land is often the punishment.” 

At this point, it’s unclear just how far Ferguson will push his online speech crusade, and therefore how far social media companies will go to comply with conservatives’ preferred content moderation policies, or lack thereof. Carr’s praise of X and Meta, though, shows exactly what the Trump administration wants. 

If the FTC’s new chair achieves his stated aim of ending online “censorship,” it will have to come at the expense of decades of agreement that private businesses can post or not post whatever they want online.

“The only thing that is worse than a social media platform determining what we can or can't say or hear is the government deciding,” Cohn said. “That is a far greater evil.”

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