US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning government officials from violating the freedom of speech under the guise of fighting misinformation.
The document, signed among a flurry of orders hours after Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president on Monday, directly criticizes his predecessor Joe Biden’s administration. Trump accused Biden of “censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms” and pressuring social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve.”
“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. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” the executive order states.
The order directs authorities to “ensure that no federal government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
President-Elect Donald Trump speaks at his victory rally at the Capital One Arena on January 19, 2025 in Washington, DC. © Scott Olson / Getty Images
Trump’s allies have consistently accused the government of using its power to suppress dissenting online views, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. A notable example was Twitter and Facebook’s brief restriction on sharing a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Republicans condemned as censorship.
Evidence of government intervention in social media emerged when tech billionaire Elon Musk, after acquiring Twitter in 2022 and rebranding it as X, revealed internal communications showing the FBI had requested the removal of accounts allegedly spreading election misinformation.
More recently, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that authorities had pressured his platform to remove content labeled as Covid misinformation, including vaccination memes.
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The US president has accused his predecessor of abusing the law under the pretext of fighting “disinformation”
