Making Censorship Real Again

The Trump administration is capitalizing on a false conspiracy of censorship to usher in the real kind

On Inauguration Day, amidst a flurry of executive orders adorned with loopy Sharpie signatures, Donald Trump restored free speech in America. Or so he claimed.

If you hadn’t noticed free speech had been abolished, don’t beat yourself up. Like several other executive actions, the order that aspires to “end federal censorship” is based on a conspiracy theory. Despite its flimsy pretext, it could usher in an era of real censorship the likes of which the United States has never seen.

Fox News mainstreamed the narrative that conservatives were being unfairly censored by social media companies in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss. The lies gained steam across right-wing media and on the same social media sites apparently doing all this censoring—and by 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the conspiracy-minded inmates were running the asylum. Musk granted a few handpicked bloggers and journalists access to select documents about the platform’s relationship with the federal government. With the publication of the so-called “Twitter Files,” they alleged that Twitter executives were complicit in acts of censorship against politically disfavored content, allowing the federal government to take it down at-will. They also claimed that private-citizen researchers funneled the content in question to federal agencies for review and removal.

Though some of their reporting had numerous factual inconsistencies and errors, that didn’t stop right-wing media from breathlessly covering it for years, or stop Jim Jordan from using it as a basis for his 21st century McCarthyist inquisition known as the “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”

I experienced the censorship mob firsthand. In March 2022 I was appointed to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, an advisory body to help coordinate and recommend guardrails on the Department’s existing responses to disinformation. The fringes of the political spectrum immediately demonized the board as a Ministry of Truth, with me as America’s chief censor. They falsely alleged that I was appointed to pick and choose what could stay on the Internet and what would come down. My family was doxxed and threatened, and the Biden Administration seemed neither willing nor able to stand up to industrial strength lies about our work. I resigned and the Board was axed a few months later.

The many threads of the right’s “censorship” allegations came together in Murthy v. Missouri, a case the Supreme Court heard last year. In it, two state Attorneys General claimed that the Biden Administration, colluding with citizen-researchers, had coerced social media platforms to remove content it found politically inconvenient. The Court dismissed the case for lack of standing; Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion. The plaintiff, she held, “fail[ed]... to link their past social-media restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms.” She added, “The plaintiff cannot rest on ‘mere allegations,’ but must instead point to factual evidence.” Ouch.

That brings us to Inauguration Day, when Trump and his team claimed that “government employees [would no longer] pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech,” a promise built on a false assertion. Government employees never had or used that power, but Trump signed the order anyway, canonizing the “censorship” conspiracy theory.

On its face, the order may look benign. Despite Trump’s delusions, free speech is the law of the land in America, so what does it change? One provision “ensure[s] that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate” anything that looks like censorship if you squint hard enough—including the kind of work that helps the public understand how true curtailing and distortion of information looks. It could be used as grounds to defund any government-funded research looking at the effects of disinformation or foreign influence, media literacy work, or any university where faculty study or teach about disinformation. All of these, of course, constitute protected speech in and of themselves.

Another of the order’s provisions, Sec. 2(b) threatens Feds who engage in such work, and yet another instructs the Attorney General to investigate the Biden Administration for activities the conservative Supreme Court found did not happen. As someone who has been the target of such frivolous investigations, I know how time- and resource-intensive they are. They are meant to keep the truth tellers occupied, and meant to scare everyone else into subservience.

The irony of all this is that the original bogeymen of the censorship conspiracy, the broligarchs of Big Tech, have shown more partisanship than ever—in the other direction. Despite conservatives losing their minds for four years that Biden officials did so much as email social media platforms, Trump sat not only Musk, but also Zuckerberg, Bezos and more in places of honor at his inauguration. He gave Musk a position within the White House, got cozy with the Chinese-owned app he sought to ban, and, through direct pressure, Meta successfully rolled back eight years of policies that maintained a modicum of truth and safety on their platform. Even before he was inaugurated, Trump has coerced social media more than Biden did in his whole term, and he has made inroads threatening mainstream media, too.

As we buckle in for four years of Trump 2.0, it’s fitting that Washington is experiencing sub-freezing temperatures. Along with a pliant and obsequious tech class, cowering news organizations, and an executive order that looms over anyone who stands for truth, a chill is in the air.

Nina Jankowicz is the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a non-profit that works to increase the cost of lies that undermine democracy. She is the author of two books and the former Executive Director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board.

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