What Next: TBD | Did The Trump Administration Censor Speech?

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Slate

Society & Culture, Technology, History

4.6 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For years, conservatives claimed that the Biden administration was pressuring tech companies to censor conservative speech with no solid evidence. In Trump 2.0, the administration is explicitly bragging about doing the very same thing they accused democrats of. What gives? Guest: Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality” Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before last week, if you logged on to Facebook, you might have seen a group called
0:09.2	Ice Siding Chicago Land. It had about 80,000 members. People used the group to identify immigration
0:16.2	agents or to warn their neighbors that an ICE raid might be coming. Then, at the request of the Trump administration, Facebook suspended the group.
0:26.2	Well, we have some insight into that from a public comment that Pam Bondi made,
0:32.6	in which she said that the administration had reached out to Facebook
0:36.5	and that in response to outreach from
0:38.5	the administration, Facebook had taken down the group. So that seems to be what happened to it.
0:44.8	That's Renee Doresta. She's an associate research professor at Georgetown who studies online
0:50.3	manipulation and abuse. What did you think when you saw that from Pam Bondi?
0:55.7	Well, you know, I thought it was very interesting. I thought it was interesting because it's not
1:01.9	abnormal for the government to communicate with tech platforms. We can talk about the long history
1:07.6	of that happening. But this particular administration has reframed any government communication with the tech
1:15.0	platforms as an egregious act of censorship.
1:22.7	The idea that the Biden administration was censoring tech platforms is a consistent refrain from President Trump and his party.
1:31.1	No longer will our government label the speech of our own citizens as misinformation or disinformation, which are the favorite words of censors and those who wish to stop the free exchange of ideas and, frankly, progress.
1:47.0	And so it was kind of remarkable to see that very public statement by Ms. Bondi and to see
1:53.9	that very public declaration, particularly since it came with very little transparent evidence to
1:59.4	justify the administration's outreach.
2:02.5	If I think it had come with something that said, we reached out because of clear incitement to
2:08.4	violence, we reached out because of clear calls to action, we reached out because of direct
2:15.0	threats to our officers and explicit doxing. Then I think there
2:18.5	would have been something where the public might have felt like these were requests that were
	...

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