Trump’s order on censorship: victory for free speech or assault on reality?

Donald Trump’s official order to end “government censorship” sounds solid – free speech is vital in democracies, after all. But it’s not so simple, experts say. In fact, Republicans seem to be engaging in censorship themselves – of facts and truth.

The executive order aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” Trump signed as soon as he entered the White House sounded a bit like he was a pure democracy defender killing off the last remnants of an authoritarian regime.

“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” the order states.

Now, federal officials are banned from any conduct that “would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizens.”

Naturally, conservatives – who have for years decried alleged censorship around the COVID-19 pandemic and elections – are now triumphant. Finally, they say, government collusion with big tech platforms is ending.

However, disinformation experts are very worried. According to them, the executive order might mean that the government will not be able to even post factual information about, say, the fires in California on social media in order to outweigh dangerous and sometimes deadly claims that are so typical these days.

Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert, recently told CNN that Trump’s order “has canonized lies and conspiracy theories about those responding to disinformation.”

To her, the order is “a direct assault in reality that emboldens both foreign actors and disinformation profiteers.” One could indeed wonder: do efforts to limit the spread of false claims about public health, for example, amount to illegal censorship?

Republicans are celebrating

To some, they do. And to them, it’s all quite simple – this particular executive order is just one example of how Trump is supposedly fighting back against Democratic excesses. To them, censorship was real during Joe Biden’s presidency.

In the order, the attorney general is instructed to investigate if the Biden administration engaged in efforts to censor Americans. Trump is (obviously) unhappy about his ban from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) in the fallout of the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.

Conservatives have also alleged that the Biden team pressured tech companies to remove misinformation about coronavirus vaccinations and that this amounted to illegal government interference.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said so himself last August and claimed he felt the government pressure to remove some posts about the pandemic “was wrong.” To the Right, this meant proof: censorship on social media does exist.

“That overreach eventually led to a Supreme Court case, though the justices ended up dodging the issue, leaving the matter unresolved,” Mark Grabowski, professor of communications at Adelphi University in New York, told Cybernews.

In a clear 6-3 ruling last summer, the Supreme Court actually said the US government could contact social media platforms about mis and disinformation. The Biden administration presented this as a major victory but the Court actually found that the plaintiffs in the case lacked standing, meaning the judges didn’t address the substance of the issue at all, in truth dodging it.

Grabowski went on: “The problem is that once you let the government get involved in censorship – even with good intentions – it opens the door to a dangerous slippery slope.”

“What starts as an effort to curb ‘misinformation’ could easily expand into censoring anything that challenges the status quo, including things like government corruption or unpopular political opinions. That would be a serious blow to free speech and public discourse,” said Grabowski.

“Blatant political interference”

Republicans, though, have spoken of much more than simple communications between the government and the tech giants. The Biden administration allegedly engaged in a backdoor campaign of coercion to silence voices it disagreed with – a practice known as “jawboning.”

“We’ve seen it happen time and time again – true stories have been censored because they were inconvenient for the political agenda of the day. Take the Hunter Biden laptop story — it was a valid, bombshell report that raised serious concerns, but social media platforms dismissed it as ‘Russian disinformation.’ That wasn’t just an error — it was blatant political interference,” Grabowski also said.

“And it’s the same story with COVID. Early reports suggesting the virus could have leaked from a lab in China were immediately labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’ and suppressed, only for those claims to be taken seriously later when more evidence came to light.”

Zuckerberg announced in January Meta was dropping fact-checking posts on its platforms and relaxing its hate speech policies. You can call LGBTQ people “mentally ill” now, for example.

However, proponents of the executive order on ‘government censorship’ seem more keen to talk about content moderation and fact-checking initiatives by the platforms themselves.

Zuckerberg announced in January Meta was dropping fact-checking posts on its platforms and relaxing its hate speech policies. You can call LGBTQ people “mentally ill” now, for example.

As a matter of fact, the decision of Meta and, earlier, X to do away with professional fact-checking is actually making Trump’s executive order moot because the platforms might be becoming digital wild west voluntarily anyway.

Still, Grabowski told Cybernews he thought that many of these “fact-checks" didn't actually involve verifying provably true or false information.

“Instead, journalists often use the term to attack controversial opinions they simply disagree with, framing them as ‘misinformation’ without ever engaging with the actual facts. And the fact-checkers themselves are rarely neutral experts,” he said.

We lack media literacy skills

Other misinformation experts strongly disagree. Jankowicz has chosen a geopolitical angle, for example: “Disinformation is not a partisan issue, it’s a democracy issue. America’s adversaries benefit when our country is internally divided and politically polarized.”

Still, more professionals want to talk about facts. For instance, when Los Angeles began burning earlier this month, conspiracy theories surged on X and other social networks – and since there’s no usual fact-checking, they continue to flourish.

Would it really hurt to have official government information or professional fact-checks next to blatantly false claims about the possible causes of the fires?

After all, after Meta ended its fact-checking program in the US, journalists were quick to point out that it wouldn’t be fair to call fact-checking censorship – as Zuckerberg, who is now a Trump’s pal, said – because social media users actually had more information provided to them, and no one was removing posts.

“Let me be clear: the decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact-checkers. They created the rules,” Aaron Sharockman, executive director of Politifact, a fact-checking organization, wrote on X.

“Our role has always been to provide additional speech and context to posts that journalists found to contain misinformation.”

.@PolitiFact will have more to say on this. But these are my thoughts. This decision has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. (PolitiFact is an original partner and has been working on this project for 8+ years). https://t.co/NjydINtNlf pic.twitter.com/OzL2UwUtmX

undefined Aaron Sharockman (@asharock) January 7, 2025

That’s why it might look like an effort by the Trump administration to shoo away inconvenient facts from users who would then believe whatever partisan information the new government and the pro-government accounts were pushing.

Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, has already warned that Trump’s executive order could be used by the administration to engage in its own form of censorship.

“The order suggests that its goal is to rewrite history to suit its own agenda and that it may itself become a vehicle for the new administration to engage in its own form of jawboning,” he said.

Jordan Mitchell, founder of marketing agency Growth Stack Media, pointed out to Cybernews that the crucial reality is that many individuals lack the media literacy skills to effectively evaluate online information across social media.

“Content moderation serves an important role in creating safer digital spaces, but it must be balanced with improved media literacy education and clearer regulatory frameworks that are actually enforced,” said Mitchell.