Trump administration looks to stop Big Tech censorship of conservatives
FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, Utah's former solicitor general, said that addressing unfair censorship by Big Tech platforms is a priority for the Trump administration because of its importance to maintaining a strong democracy.
In an interview with the Deseret News, Holyoak said the Federal Trade Commission's request for public comment on censorship by technology companies will give the FTC the ability to plan enforcement actions and inform Congress about the extent of the problem.
'It's one of the most important questions of our day,' Holyoak said. 'Big Tech has become part of the public modern square in that this is where people are interacting, this is where they're getting their news.'
Nearly 3,000 individuals or companies, including several free speech organizations, responded to the FTC's public comment period.
But the question of whether biased content moderation policies should result in federal intervention, including the breakup of companies, has polarized advocates.
The conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom submitted its response on Wednesday in a letter chronicling what it considers to be extensive examples of Big Tech using vague policies to censor speech.
The group alleges that Meta (the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Google and Apple have relied on subjective criteria that penalizes posts that go against certain government policies.
One instance cited by Alliance Defending Freedom is the temporary suspension of the accounts for the pro-life website LifeNews.com and LifeNews CEO Steven Ertelt in January.
Other organizations, including the International Center for Law and Economics and the Cato Institute, submitted comments in opposition to FTC action, arguing that content moderation does not represent a misuse of market power.
Policies that disproportionately restrict conservative viewpoints exist, according to Holyoak. The question is whether tech platforms are misleading in their 'terms and conditions' about how these policies are used, and whether the use of these policies reveals a lack of competition.
'You can imagine a social media company that acquires a ton of monopoly power,' Holyoak said. 'They could do things that could harm consumers in many ways, including, for example, by degrading the product quality, and one manifestation of that could be the content and the moderation policies.'
But concern over content moderation that bleeds into censorship goes beyond the impacts on consumers. If left unchecked, these policies could have a negative impact on Americans' ability to exercise their citizenship, Holyoak said.
Ensuring that massive social media platforms allow 'both the access and the opportunity for people to be able to share their ideas' is, according to Holyoak, 'critical to our country as it operates, and to democracy, frankly, in general.'
One conservative influencer shared with the Deseret News how he believes the addition of artificial intelligence to the most dominant social media platforms could shape the future of U.S. elections.
Robby Starbuck, an anti-DEI activist and former music video director, filed a lawsuit against Meta last month, alleging that the $1.6 trillion behemoth committed defamation by knowingly distributing false statements about him to third parties for over nine months.
Since filing the lawsuit, Starbuck has learned that previous versions of Meta's AI program that still contain the false claims about his ideological views and criminal background were downloaded millions of times to develop new apps without the ability to correct the information.
The ability for AI to make authoritative statements about an individual that are demonstrably false, and the reticence Meta allegedly showed in responding, foreshadows a concerning future where insurance programs, reputation scoring and candidate information could be based on lies produced by AI, Starbuck said.
'You can very easily imagine a scenario where you shift an election by a couple percentage points,' Starbuck said, 'especially with the uptake of use by young people, when it comes to AI for questions, and the high percentage of them that believe everything AI tells them.'
Republicans have for years alleged Big Tech uses tactics to oppose conservatives. In 2022, the Republican National Committee filed an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against Alphabet, accusing Google of intentionally sending the party's email messages to spam folders.
On Wednesday, the NRCC and NRSC, the House and Senate Republican campaign committees, called on the FTC to investigate whether Google's email platform suppressed messages to potential conservative donors.
Examples like these suggest that certain Big Tech companies wield so much market dominance that they are unafraid of harming consumers who have little to no alternative to their products, Starbuck said.
'Just look at the behavior of Big Tech companies like Meta during COVID and the ability to censor information that ultimately ended up being true and there being no real recourse for people that that happened to,' Starbuck said.
Since mid-April, the FTC has waged a courtroom battle against Meta, alleging that the company pursued mergers with Instagram and WhatsApp over a decade ago with the deliberate purpose of eliminating competitors.
Meta has attempted to get the federal lawsuit dismissed, arguing that the two apps became better for consumers after the mergers and that the FTC's definition of relevant competitors is too narrow because it does not include TikTok, YouTube or X.
Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, said there has been a shift in recent years on both sides of the aisle, but especially among conservatives, to view big technology platforms as 'automatically bad.'
Huddleston, who authored a comment urging the FTC not to conflate unfair content moderation with anti-competitive practices, said that increasing the scope of antitrust policy to include censorship could open the door to increasingly political interventions from the FTC.
'Is this actually about concerns related to market behavior, or is this about animosity towards tech companies?' Huddleston asked. 'Antitrust is designed for a very specific purpose related to competition, and if we start seeing it opened for these other policy purposes, it could lose that objective standard and be a way that the government can make many excuses to intervene in a wide array of markets.'
Huddleston said she believes this kind of intervention could actually make censorship worse if companies are broken up and have less resources for content moderation, or are afraid of FTC action and adopt more narrow content policies.
An antitrust approach to Big Tech is unnecessary, she said, because current law does not require neutrality in content moderation policies and there is a wide array of competition for users looking for different content moderation standards.
If an individual doesn't like the quality of discourse on Meta, they can migrate to more conservative alternatives — like X or Truth Social — or to more liberal ones — like Bluesky or Threads, Huddleston pointed out.
'Once a government has been given a power, it's very hard to get that power back,' she said. 'The power won't just be with an FTC that you might happen to agree with politically, it would also be with an FTC that you might disagree with politically.'
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The immediate aftermath of a disaster—especially if you have to stay in an emergency shelter or hotel—can be challenging mentally. 'The hurricane doesn't hit and then a month later everything is back to normal,' she says. 'It takes a lot of time and requires a lot of patience. Ultimately, having these even basic comfort items can go such a long way in protecting your mental health after a disaster, so that you're able to better focus on all of the other needs that you have.' The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) maintains a free helpline for those experiencing mental health crises—although recent cuts at the agency have impacted the helpline's staff. The Red Cross also has a helpline specifically for those recovering from disasters needing emotional support. Above all, experts say that the best disaster plans often start with preparing the community around you. 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