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The Media Today

On Free Speech and Speaking Freely

What Trump’s ‘censorship’ order means.
January 22, 2025 By Jon Allsop
 

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Yesterday, Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary, appeared on Fox & Friends. She was asked whether, at her first press briefing, she would have to painstakingly consult a binder before answering reporters’ questions—a snarky reference to her Biden-era predecessor Karine Jean-Pierre. Leavitt replied that she might bring in some notes, but that “my binder is in my brain, because I know President Trump’s policies, and we have truth on our side”—but she then revealed that there wouldn’t actually be a briefing later on; instead, the press would be hearing directly from Trump, who would be making a “big infrastructure announcement.” Online, liberal pundits quipped that it must be “infrastructure week” again.

A press secretary appearing on Fox, rather than in the briefing room; “infrastructure week”: one could be forgiven for thinking that a wormhole had opened up and we’d all been taken back in time to Trump’s first term. (Back then, “infrastructure week” became joking journalistic shorthand for Trump’s—perpetually frustrated—efforts to establish a disciplined policy and messaging agenda.) Some of Trump’s policy moves since returning to office on Monday have inspired a similar sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu: his moves to crack down on the border, his withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord—and a very early executive order, signed onstage at the Capital One Arena in front of an adoring crowd, aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” During his first go-round, Trump repeatedly issued orders with similar titles and aims. In 2017, he signed one promoting “free speech and religious liberty,” the centerpiece of which, per the New York Times, was a bid to create more space for political endorsements from the pulpit (though the head of the American Civil Liberties Union dismissed the effort at the time as “an elaborate photo op with no discernible policy outcome”). In 2019, Trump attempted to link federal cash to the preservation of free speech on college campuses, and took rhetorical aim at “rigid, far-left ideology” (though the details were kinda vague). In 2020—after Twitter appended fact-checks to two of his tweets baselessly casting doubt on mail-in voting—Trump signed an executive order aimed at “preventing online censorship,” and even suggested, in remarks at the same time, that he would shutter Twitter if he could. Major platforms’ content moderation decisions represented “one of the greatest dangers” to free speech “in American history,” Trump told reporters. (Again, the order itself was of dubious enforceability.)

If Trump’s latest “free speech” order marks a return to a familiar theme, however, the context is now different. Of the platforms that provoked Trump’s ire back in 2020, Twitter is now owned by his close ally Elon Musk (and is now called X) while Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has recently pledged to roll back its third-party fact-checking partnerships in a move widely interpreted as kowtowing to Trump. (That’s before we get into the visual of tech titans standing side by side in front of Trump’s incoming cabinet at the inauguration on Monday.) And the text of the new order explicitly takes aim at the administration that came in between Trump’s first term and his second, and its practice of liaising with social media companies with the aim of restricting the flow of mis- and disinformation online. (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, recently alleged to the podcaster Joe Rogan that Biden officials would sometimes yell at his staff to take down certain content.) Trump’s order characterizes this sort of thing as egregious government censorship, and prohibits it going forward. It also directs the attorney general to investigate Biden-era processes and suggest “appropriate remedial actions.” (Trump has previously advocated firings.)

Predictably, the order quickly faced questions and criticism. The Associated Press noted that it “does not acknowledge” how online lies “have increasingly snowballed into real-world threats, harassment and targeted violence,” and that it doesn’t seem to address how malicious foreign actors peddle such lies. The AP quoted Nina Jankowicz—a disinformation researcher and frequent target of right-wing fury who now leads a group called the American Sunlight Project—describing the order as nothing more than “vengeance for a slight that never happened”; in a series of posts on Bluesky, Jankowicz further characterized it as “the culmination of four years of lies” as to what officials, tech companies, and researchers “actually did,” and argued that, “since there’s nothing binding or enforceable here, it’s important to see it for what it is: government intimidation, pure and simple.” David Kaye, a former United Nations rapporteur on free expression, told Reuters that the order seeks to prohibit conduct that is already prohibited by the First Amendment, and dismissed it as a “deeply cynical” exercise in public relations. 

Others took a more textured view. In addition to obviously political right-wing attacks, various free speech advocates and tech experts have long raised concerns of their own about the appropriateness of government officials speaking about content with tech companies and what lines they might be crossing in the process. Writing for Just Security yesterday, Alex Abdo, of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, made the case that a “version” of Trump’s order could have addressed such questions in “good faith,” and that a section of the actual order reminding officials not to violate the First Amendment appears “unobjectionable.” Other sections of the order, however, assert as fact that the Biden administration censored social media users—despite even the conservative-dominated Supreme Court describing the evidence for this proposition as “weak”—and, in doing so, effectively preempt the conclusion of any probe by the attorney general. Abdo also noted that the order has nothing to say about recent instances in which Republicans have sought to curb private speech: that of disinformation researchers, say, or pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. Ultimately, Abdo concludes, the order is a work of “revisionist history” that “may itself become a vehicle” for the new administration to restrict speech it doesn’t like.

If the context for Trump’s latest order is new—and the subject matter with which it attempts to engage is genuinely fraught—Abdo’s conclusion is also painfully familiar from Trump’s first term: the subordination of legitimate debate about the inherent complexity of “free speech” discourse to an almost cartoonish position of free speech for me but not for thee. Last time around, this dynamic perhaps reached its zenith in the days after Trump’s 2020 order taking aim at “online censorship,” when he infamously posted the message “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” on various platforms as racial-justice protests spread across the country following the police murder of George Floyd: Twitter, as it was then known, concluded that Trump had violated its rules against the glorification of violence and hid his post behind a warning message; over at Facebook, Zuckerberg suggested that Trump wasn’t immune from rules about violent posts, and reportedly complained to Trump privately that he was putting the company in a difficult position, but ultimately left the post up, citing the public “need to know” if the government is planning to use force. (The episode serves as a useful reminder that, while Zuckerberg’s overt chumminess with Trump might be new, his current posturing is more complex than a total 180.) I argued at the time that Zuckerberg’s approach failed to take into account the unavoidable free speech implications of platforms’ algorithms, interpersonal contact between leaders and tech titans, and the chilling effects of false or violent speech on other speech. The latter concern would be borne out a few months later, when a tidal wave of election denialism—not least that disseminated by Trump—culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. After that, even Facebook suspended Trump’s account.

Now that Trump is back in office, such free speech tradeoffs feel freshly urgent—and delicate, despite the effort of Trump’s order to blitz through them. Zuckerberg has sold his recent stripping back of fact-checking as a free speech move, even though it impinges on the speech of fact-checkers and could well drive other users to take their speech off Meta’s platforms for fear of it being drowned in lies; as Abdo notes, Trump’s new order looks poised to elevate speech he likes while chilling criticism of it. Trump’s move this week to pardon or commute the sentences of January 6 rioters—including those convicted of violent offenses and members of militias—frees their speech (and maybe much worse) to the detriment of those who have condemned, prosecuted, or testified against them. (After being released from prison, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, did an interview with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yesterday and warned that “the people who did this” to him and his fellow convicts need to “feel the heat.”) Writing in the conservative Washington Examiner yesterday, Tom Rogan made the case that another early Trump move—to rescind Secret Service protections for John Bolton, a former Trump adviser turned sharp critic—is an abrogation of his free speech rhetoric since it opens Bolton to tangible threats (Iran has reportedly plotted to kill him) in apparent retaliation for his anti-Trump speech. Overnight, Trump slammed a DC pastor who had earlier given a sermon in his presence and urged him to show mercy toward communities “scared” by his return to power. Trump has the right to criticize the pastor, of course—but it was a bit rich coming from a man who once signed an order promoting political speech in church. (And that’s before we get into the Republican congressman who called for the pastor to be “added to the deportation list.”)

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Then, of course, there’s the media, which Trump has bashed, otherwise credibly threatened, and targeted with increasingly absurd (and yet sometimes successful, at least in terms of scoring a settlement) lawsuits—creating a chilling climate going into his presidency, as I wrote on Monday. So far since taking office, Trump has, at least, been extraordinarily available to the press, taking reporters’ questions at length while he signed orders on Monday and then again yesterday at a news conference tied to the infrastructure announcement, which turned out to be a significant commitment to extend AI data capacity on US soil. (Whatever Trump’s free speech credentials, he certainly likes to speak freely.) Writing for CJR yesterday, Jake Lahut reported that “a surprising number of people on the daily White House beat” are looking forward to having better access to Trump than they did to Biden, even if that optimism comes with worries about intimidation. (“We’re coming out of four years of Biden and things haven’t been great,” one White House reporter told Lahut.)

As I argued when Biden was in office, media access to the president is generally good for press freedom—but is a starting point, not the be-all and end-all. With Trump, the things that he says—and, not least when it comes to free speech and press freedom, does—matter most. (As the Washington Post noted, Trump repeated many of his typical “exaggerations, falsehoods and attacks” in his presser yesterday, including the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and a “bizarre” claim about the water supply in Los Angeles.) The same is true of his representatives. A White House reporter told Lahut that the press corps views Leavitt and Steven Cheung, the new communications director, as “full MAGA,” but also “professionals.” But they, too, should be judged on the things that they say, more than the access they offer.

Not that access is necessarily a given. After discussing a range of issues on Fox & Friends yesterday—including the January 6 pardons, which she said were not “causing much controversy”—Leavitt was asked when her first briefing would be, but the host who had asked the question was met by silence; Leavitt had dropped off the line. After a few seconds, she came back. “When is your first press briefing?” a different host asked. “To be announced,” Leavitt replied.


Other notable stories:

  • We noted in yesterday’s newsletter that a blockbuster trial had been set to begin in London over claims, made by Prince Harry and a senior former British lawmaker, that Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids illegally accessed their private information—only for the start of proceedings to be delayed to allow the parties’ lawyers to talk. This morning, it emerged that Harry and the lawmaker have reached settlements in the case in exchange for damages, an apology, and an admission of wrongdoing—not only at the now-shuttered News of the World newspaper, but also on the part of private investigators working for The Sun, the first time that Murdoch’s UK arm has made such an admission about the latter paper. The settlement means that claims against Murdoch executives won’t be tested in court, NPR’s David Folkenflik reports.
  • The Guardian’s Ruth Michaelson and Obaida Hamad spoke with the new temporary head of Syria’s state news agency, who was appointed to the post by the caretaker government that ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad, as well as with longer-standing state-media staffers about their hopes and fears for the future of the apparatus. A month after Assad fled, the new government is starting to overhaul “the same propaganda organs that had labelled them as terrorists,” but its commitment to press freedom remains unclear and “uncertainty reigns” for those who worked for the organs under Assad, who fear everything from “being accused of allegiance to the Assad regime” to “prosecution for embedding with [Assad’s] troops during the long civil war.”
  • Press Gazette’s Bron Maher spoke with Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the former US news editor at the Financial Times who recently moved to Semafor to anchor an invite-only newsletter that aims to serve chief executives of companies that make at least five hundred million dollars a year. (The product intends to expand into events, audio, and video.) Its target readers “are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time, and finding that the media coverage ostensibly targeted at them isn’t quite doing what it says,” he told Maher.
  • And CJR’s Sacha Biazzo explored how journalists should think about covering stupidity (including our own), and canvassed writers in Europe who have recently wrestled with the concept philosophically. One contributor to the debate recently described World War I as “the result of an enormous concentration of stupidity at the highest levels of European political and military leadership.” He notes that, “from Europe at least, American society seems to be in the grip of a similar moment.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.