How Trump’s executive order on online free speech could upend content moderation

Marketplace Tech

American Public Media

Technology, News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amid all the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump during his first week in office came a promise to “restore freedom of speech” and end federal censorship. Keen observers may note that freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution. But the order seems to have something more specific in mind. It calls out what it characterizes as the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech under the guise of combatting misinformation.” Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that the order is a signal of the president’s continued focus on content moderation online.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What Trump might mean when he says he's restoring freedom of speech.
0:06.7	From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.
0:09.6	I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.
0:20.0	Amid the executive order paloza of President Donald Trump's first week in office, came a promise to restore freedom of speech and end federal censorship.
0:31.6	Keene observers may note that freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution, but the order seems to have something more specific
0:39.3	in mind. It calls out what it characterizes as the Biden administration's pressure campaign on
0:45.1	social media companies to quote, moderate, de-platform, or otherwise suppress speech under the
0:51.5	guise of combating misinformation.
0:59.6	The order is a signal of the president's continued focus on content moderation online,
1:03.9	according to Will Arremus, tech news analysis writer for the Washington Post.
1:13.7	What he's doing, though, is equating censorship with online content moderation and rules around what people can say online.
1:21.7	And in particular, he uses the executive order to assert that the Biden administration abused its power when it talked with tech companies or potentially pressured tech companies to take down
1:30.8	certain types of misinformation, conspiracy theories, mostly stuff around COVID-19 and the vaccines
1:38.2	and some around January 6th in the 2020 election.
1:42.1	And this is kind of a practice that has come to be called
1:45.5	jawboning. That's right. So jawboning is an older term, but it refers to when someone in
1:54.1	government uses their position of authority to try to influence the decisions of private companies. It's not a legal term, so jawboning
2:04.9	per se isn't, there's no law against jawboning, but when you're jawboning private companies
2:11.2	around their decisions about speech, that could be a form of censorship by proxy depending on how it's done.
2:21.5	However, when the government is telling social media companies, or if the government were telling
2:27.5	social media companies what their speech policies should be, then that could be deemed government
2:33.7	censorship. And so that was at issue in a case that could be deemed government censorship.
	...

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