NEW YORK – President Donald Trump on Monday ordered that no federal officer, employee or agent may unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen, an early step toward his campaign promise to dismantle what he called government “censorship” of U.S. citizens.
The president’s executive order, issued just hours after he was sworn in to a second term, comes after Trump and his supporters have accused the federal government of pressuring social media companies to take down lawful posts over concerns around misinformation.
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The order also instructs the attorney general, in consultation with other executive agency heads, to investigate how federal government actions over the four years of the Biden administration could have infringed on free speech and propose “remedial actions” based on the findings.
Trump’s order, which he signed onstage at Capital One Arena along with a slate of other executive actions, shows how motivated he is to crack down on what he calls the “censorship cartel” on his first day in office.
It’s a winning stance among his supporters, many of whom feel that the federal government has unfairly targeted lawful speech from right-wing voices.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently echoed that accusation, saying senior Biden administration officials pressured his employees to inappropriately “censor” content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elon Musk, the owner of the social platform X, has accused the FBI of illegally coercing Twitter before his tenure to suppress a story about Hunter Biden.
While former Twitter executives conceded they made a mistake by blocking that story just before the 2020 presidential election, they have adamantly denied that they acted in response to government pressure.
The Supreme Court last year sided with former President Joe Biden’s administration in a dispute with Republican-led states over how far the federal government can go to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security.
Trump's executive order does not acknowledge the gravity of harmful online falsehoods, which have increasingly snowballed into real-world threats, harassment and targeted violence. Four years ago, Trump’s own torrent of lies about the 2020 election prompted threats against election officials and culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It’s not yet clear how the order could affect the work that several U.S. agencies do to track false claims that pose threats to election security, including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA.
CISA, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has faced criticism from Republicans for its efforts to counter misinformation. Trump’s pick to head DHS, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, said during a Senate confirmation hearing last week that she was willing to rein in the agency's work if that’s what federal lawmakers want.
Outgoing CISA Director Jen Easterly has defended the agency’s work, saying it “does not censor, has never censored.”
Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said that with the order Trump “seeks vengeance for a slight that never happened.”
Jankowicz, who ran a federal government Disinformation Governance Board under Biden's Department of Homeland Security that was disbanded after it was attacked by conservatives, said the order emboldens foreign actors and others “who use disinformation as a tool to destabilize our country and profit from lies.”
Trump’s order focuses on Americans’ speech. It's too soon to tell how that will influence the way federal agencies communicate with social media companies about false claims that originate abroad. Many disinformation campaigns from U.S. adversaries, which have targeted voters, are promoted online by American citizens.
Trump has styled himself as a champion of free expression since his first presidency, when he lashed out at the social platform then known as Twitter for posting fact-check labels on his tweets about mail-in ballots.
At the same time, he frequently targets the press, calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” and has threatened to seek retribution against the news media in his second administration, including suggesting that the broadcast licenses of certain television news networks should be pulled.
After having a rocky relationship with social media companies in the past, Trump has recently cozied up to the tech billionaires who run the platforms where Americans communicate with each other.
He gave prime seats at his inauguration to Elon Musk, the owner of X, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, which owns YouTube. He also has taken credit for the return of TikTok in the U.S., and welcomed TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at the Capitol for his swearing-in ceremony.
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