An Italian version of this article was published by the same author on 22 January 2025.
Donald Trump spent his second first day in office signing a flurry of executive orders, flanked by a swarm of reporters.
This is what he had promised – and what he had long dreamt since losing the Oval Office to Joe Biden: a full-time spectacle of a presidency.
Among the stack of measures, one stands out for its grand ambition of “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.”
“Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies,” the provision declares.
Mark Zuckerberg struck a similar note last August in a letter he sent to the Republican-led House judiciary committee.
Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:
1. Biden-Harris Admin “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans.
2. Facebook censored Americans.
3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024
In one of the first signs of his recent pro-Trump epiphany, Meta’s CEO felt compelled to bow his head for having restricted or removed fake or misleading content about Covid-19 and vaccines on Facebook.
Like Trump, he laid the blame on Joe Biden’s administration for pressuring his platform to tighten oversight of pandemic-related content.
It was the summer of rekindled romance between Zuckerberg and the then-future president.
Just weeks before addressing his letter to the judiciary committee, Meta severed the last ties restraining Trump’s social media profiles, and Zuckerberg phoned the soon-to-be White House tenant to apologise for Facebook mistakenly labelling a photo of him following the assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In the wake of Trump’s re-election, Zuckerberg delivered the finishing blow, replacing Meta’s independent external fact-checking programmes with X-style Community Notes, driven by user recommendations.
Social media giants had seemingly anticipated the president’s executive order, suddenly gripped by an unexpected urge to safeguard free speech from an imaginary censorship that fact-checkers never witnessed.
“Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts; it’s added information and context to controversial claims, and it’s debunked hoax content and conspiracy theories,” Angie Drobnic Holan, Director of International Fact-Checking Network, wrote on LinkedIn. “The fact-checkers used by Meta follow a Code of Principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency.”
Trump: What is this one?
“Withdrawing from the World Heath Organization”
Trump: Ohhh pic.twitter.com/kyh9I1lXyq
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 21, 2025
Another one for MAGA
It remained to be seen to which alleged threats Trump vowed to defend US citizens from.
The executive order bars “taxpayers resources” from being used to “engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
The political intent behind the measure was crystal clear, The Washington Post wrote.
Denouncing efforts to curb fake news on public health, vaccines, and 2020 elections as a form of censorship had long been a staple of the MAGA playbook.
“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens ,” the provision states.
Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th US president, and Mark Zuckerberg, Ceo of Meta. Photo by Flickr.
According to The Post, the executive order that has come into force could help coordinate efforts with tech companies that have already adopted the new guidelines.
It marks another temporary victory for Trump’s 2.0 White House, its fans, and allies who thrive on disinformation and weaponise it against content moderation.
One of the most fraught moments between Trump and previous restrictive social media policies came in 2021, with Meta suspending the former president’s accounts for two years “following his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6.”
Those tensions now seem entirely smoothed over.
“What Trump’s executive order on ‘Ending Federal Censorship’ really does is chill critical speech about bad actors who use disinformation as a tool to destabilize our country and profit from lies,” said Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a bipartisan advocacy group against online disinformation.
