President Donald Trump has ordered his attorney general to investigate how the previous administration “trampled free speech rights” by seeking to combat misinformation on social media platforms.
The directive, which came amid a flurry of executive orders on Trump’s first day in office, forbids government agencies and employees from abridging freedom of speech—something already prohibited by the First Amendment—and says the federal government should “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the federal government related to censorship of protected speech.”
It is the latest sign that restrictions around online misinformation are likely to evaporate for the next four years as the new administration crusades against perceived anti-conservative bias on social media and tech executives cozy up to a president who has threatened to throw at least one of them—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg—in jail for life.
On Monday, Zuckerberg was joined by X owner Elon Musk and Google CEO Sundar Pichai at Trump’s inauguration. Tech executives had helped pay for the day’s festivities, racing to write Trump’s inaugural committee $1 million checks. And in the weeks leading up to the new administration taking office, Meta has been particularly aggressive in kissing Trump’s ring, announcing an end to fact-checking and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that have long fueled far-right claims of bias.
Research has widely refuted those claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms. A New York University study found that conservative-leaning posts on Facebook tended to outperform liberal-leaning posts. And a recent article in Nature concluded that while pro-Trump users were more likely to be suspended from Twitter during the 2020 election, they were also far more likely to share links from low-quality news sources that likely violated the platform’s misinformation policies.
“This executive order seems to be designed just to announce the Trump administration’s narrative rather than to engage with the actual evidence,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
In 2023, a group of Republican state attorneys general and social media users sued the Biden administration alleging that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other executive agencies had colluded with social media platforms to suppress free speech by flagging posts that contained misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and election integrity. A conservative federal district court and an appeals court both sided with the attorneys general and issued a preliminary injunction barring federal agencies from flagging content for social media companies or encouraging them to delete content.
But in June 2024, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court threw out that preliminary injunction. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that the plaintiffs had failed to show that content restrictions on their accounts were caused by the government. Rather, “the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment,” she wrote.
Abdo said he sympathizes with people who don’t like the idea of government officials having private conversations with social media companies about what can and can’t be posted.
Courts have recognized that In some cases the government has a legitimate interest in persuading platforms or news outlets to suppress information—for example, in instances where a post or article might compromise a federal investigation or national security mission.
But Abdo said the problem arises when those communications shift from efforts to persuade to outright coercion and he worries that the attorney general’s report the new executive order requires could itself be a mechanism for coercing social media companies to promote Trump’s viewpoints or instructing federal agencies to restrict funding for misinformation research.
“It’s very strange that the order directs the attorney general to investigate something that the order has already taken a position on,” he said.
