United States President-elect Donald Trump will soon take office, and while much attention has been paid to his stances on immigration, abortion rights and democracy, less has been paid to how he may threaten internet freedoms.
His appointments to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other government agencies appear inclined to censor speech on the internet and generally make the internet less free than it has been in years past, tech experts warned.
One of the more well-known figures who may pose a threat to free speech on the internet is Brendan Carr. Currently a commissioner at the FCC, which regulates the media, Carr has been tapped by Trump to lead the agency. Carr has styled himself as a critic of Big Tech, and while the president-elect called him “a warrior for free speech”, Carr has targeted speech on the internet in the past.
“He’s going to try to turn the FCC into the online speech police,” Evan Greer, director of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told Al Jazeera.
In the proposed right-wing governance guide for the incoming administration known as Project 2025, a section written by Carr on the FCC advocates scrapping “Section 230’s current approach”. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from liability for user posts and allows companies to moderate those posts. In Project 2025, Carr argued Section 230 should have “fundamental” reforms, including limitations on companies’ ability to moderate or remove posts that reflect “core political viewpoints”.
In letters to social media companies, he also accused fact-checking services of being part of a “censorship cartel” and warned that the new Republican Congress and administration would “review” social media actions that have “curtailed [free speech] rights”.
“He has made it explicitly clear that he intends to use the power of the FCC to target ‘Big Tech censorship’, by which he means punishing any tech company that does not promote right-wing propaganda to his personal satisfaction,” said Mary Anne Franks, a professor of intellectual property, technology and civil rights law at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
In the past, Carr has threatened to pull broadcast licences from news networks that he felt were not “acting in the public interest”, including CBS after it aired an interview with Trump’s presidential opponent Kamala Harris that was criticised by Trump. Although he has presented himself as a champion of free speech, he also appears to have supported censoring speech that the incoming administration does not like.
As for the FTC, which is meant to protect consumers, Trump has chosen Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency. Ferguson is also seen as a threat to internet freedoms. He is of the mind that Big Tech companies have been censoring conservative speech and wants to use his power to push back against that.
Ferguson wants to use antitrust law to go after these companies, and he has claimed he will, as head of the FTC, help the Trump administration “terminate uncooperative bureaucrats”. That could mean getting rid of critical career civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists.
“Ferguson is really singing a lot of the same tune with a slightly different set of authorities,” said Matt Wood, general counsel and vice president of policy at the Free Press nonprofit group.
Ferguson has made it clear he would use the FTC to go after speech online related to gender-affirming care, LGBTQ issues and abortion, Greer told Al Jazeera.
Experts and free speech advocates have warned that both of these nominees seemingly want to use the power they would have to elevate conservative voices and suppress voices they disagree with.
“There’s also Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, another proponent of the ‘conservative censorship’ myth and who has a track record of aggressively attacking social media companies and other entities that attempt to uphold minimal standards of anti-discrimination,” Franks said.
Dhillon, a lawyer and a conservative activist, defended a Google employee accused of sexism who was fired during the first Trump administration after he wrote a memo stating that, because of biological differences, women are less effective programmers.
As head of the Civil Rights Division, Dhillon would be able to go after tech companies, potentially through lawsuits, for allegedly violating the civil liberties of conservatives and could cause these companies to allow more abusive or threatening speech on their platforms that targets minorities and the left and less speech that is critical of the incoming administration. Indeed, at the time of announcing his pick, Trump lauded Dhillon for taking on Big Tech and for “suing corporations who use woke policies”.
‘Come after’ journalists
Beyond these nominees, there are people who will be advising Trump, such as the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his tech billionaire friend David Sacks, who supported Musk throughout his takeover of Twitter. They have also been known to promote the idea that conservative voices are being censored on the internet, and they’re fierce opponents of liberal ideology.
Many First Amendment experts worry that Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, a former public defender and a Trump loyalist, will go after journalists the administration doesn’t like if he’s confirmed. In fact, he has repeatedly said he would do just that while on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s podcast. This could also be an internet freedom issue because he could use the nation’s vast surveillance state to do so.
“At a certain point, it’s almost difficult to separate our digital rights from our brick-and-mortar rights,” Greer said.
It could be argued that a person’s internet freedoms are curtailed when they’re being surveilled because then they are less able to act freely without fear of retribution. This creates a situation in which people are more likely to self-censor.
During the first Trump administration, for example, the government surveilled the social media profiles of Black Lives Matter activists raising concerns around their ability to freely express their political opinions on the internet.
These attacks can be viewed as part of what Wood called the administration’s “broader assault on freedom of speech”, including Trump’s threats, like Carr’s, to take away the broadcast licences of news corporations that report the news in ways he doesn’t like.
It’s not clear if all of Trump’s nominees will be approved by the Senate when they are up for votes in the weeks to come, but what is clear is that many of them share similar ideals and could fundamentally change or limit free expression on the internet.