Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed a bevy of executive orders earlier this week, including one that seeks to end the federal government’s pressure campaign on social media companies.
The “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” executive order reaffirms the free speech rights of social media users and prohibits government agents from engaging in unconstitutional censorship.
“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,” states the order. “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
This order is, as the Abundance Institute’s Neil Chilson recognized, “good and appropriate.” Much of the censorship on social media sites that rightly irked libertarians, conservatives, and dissidents of all stripes was not enforced by the platforms of their own free will; on the contrary, they were browbeaten by various federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the White House.
It’s right and proper for Trump to tell the bureaucrats who work at these agencies: that’s enough of that. The First Amendment protects misinformation and hate speech, and the feds have no business policing these categories of speech on social media.
Hellbound and Down 