New York CNN —
One of President Donald Trump’s first actions as he returned to the Oval Office on Monday was signing an executive order aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” of US citizens.
The order bans federal officials from any conduct that “would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen” and instructs the attorney general to investigate if the Biden administration engaged in efforts to censor Americans.
“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.
Right-wing media figures and some Republicans in Congress have for years decried what they claim are efforts by Democrats and technology platforms to censor their speech online, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic and elections. The Supreme Court ruled last year the US government can contact social media companies about mis- and disinformation swirling on their platforms, handing the Biden administration a major victory.
While conservatives viewed Trump’s order as the fulfillment of his promise to end government collusion with Big Tech platforms to censor their voices, some disinformation experts warned the move will only further the spread of false information on social media, which can become dangerous in times of crises.
Nina Jankowicz, who briefly led the Biden administration’s disinformation board and is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said Trump’s order “has canonized lies and conspiracy theories about those responding to disinformation,” calling it “a direct assault on reality” that “emboldens both foreign actors and disinformation profiteers.”
“Disinformation is not a partisan issue; it’s a democracy issue,” she said. “America’s adversaries benefit when our country is internally divided and politically polarized.”
Other experts pointed out that the order could have a chilling effect on relations between government agencies and tech platforms, potentially harming national security.
“The vast majority of tech-government contact is not around political speech but is around areas of national security and fighting financial fraud and child sexual abuse material,” said John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University.
While Wihbey said there are “legitimate concerns about government jawboning,” where the government uses pressure to silence speech, the important “pipeline between tech companies and the Department of Justice/FBI and intel communities will be impeded by this order.”
Most of the experts pointed out that Trump’s executive order may also be moot, since some of the biggest social media platforms have taken it upon themselves to eliminate professional fact checkers and drastically expand the type of language allowed on their services.
Earlier this month, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta announced it would abandon its fact-checking program and loosen its “hateful policy” conduct to allow posts that call LGBTQ people “mentally ill.” The move came after Trump and other Republicans lambasted Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg for what they decried as censorship of right-wing views.
Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, warned that Trump’s executive order could be used by the administration to engage in its own form of censorship by directing the attorney general to investigate the last administration’s actions.
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.
“There’s an alternative version of this executive order that would have been a genuine victory for free speech,” Abdo continued. “That version of the order would have directed the government to look at the evidence of jawboning in its own possession and across multiple contexts, and to follow the evidence where it leads. Unfortunately, that’s not what we got.”
Ending disinformation enforcement efforts could also lead to more abuse, said Alia Dastagir, a USA Today disinformation reporter and author of a forthcoming book on women facing online harassment.
“[A]buse and harassment, which is often driven by disinformation, leads to less speech, to a collective silencing,” she said. “We cannot think of online abuse only as rape and death threats, but as the dissemination of lies that contribute to violence against some of the most vulnerable people in our society.”
