The newly inaugurated US President, Donald Trump, has signed an executive order just hours after taking office, prohibiting government officials from violating the freedom of opinion under the guise of combating “false information.”
In the document, Trump accused his predecessor, Joe Biden, of “censoring the opinions of American citizens on online platforms” and putting social media platforms under pressure to “moderate, remove, or suppress expressions that the government did not agree with.” The document further stated: “Under the guise of combating ‘false information’ ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ the federal government has violated the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens in the United States in a way that promoted the preferred narrative of the government on important topics of public debate in a free society. Censorship of opinion by the state is unbearable in a free society.”
Trump ordered that officials must ensure that “no employee, agent, or representative of the federal government shall engage in or promote any behavior that would unconstitutionally restrict the freedom of opinion of an American citizen.”
Trump’s allies have long accused the Biden administration of abusing its power to silence dissenting opinions online – particularly during the COVID-19 crisis and in the context of the 2020 presidential election.
In 2020, Twitter and Facebook temporarily suspended the sharing of a – factually correct – article by the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, with Republicans labeling it as censorship.
Tech mogul Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X, published an internal memo revealing that the FBI had asked Twitter to delete accounts spreading alleged false information about the 2020 election.
Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, stated earlier this month that the authorities had put pressure on his platform to remove content labeled as “COVID-19 misinformation.