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Censorship Industrial Complex

Here’s How The Trump Admin Could Help Crush The Censorship Industry

Published

12 months ago

8 minute read

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Katelynn Richardson

The Trump administration has a major opportunity to deal a blow to the sprawling censorship industry, both inside the government and in the private sector.

Trump promised in a campaign video from Dec. 2022 to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” by, among other proposals, signing an executive order banning agencies from collaborating with private platforms to suppress speech and ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate parties involved in censorship.

“If Trump takes the steps that he has indicated he will, one focus of anti-censorship efforts I anticipate is nonprofits like the Atlantic Council and Stanford Internet Observatory [SIO] that operate as middlemen between the government and the tech companies,” New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney Jenin Younes told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As President, Trump should ensure that the White House and his executive agencies do not work with these groups to censor ‘mis’ or ‘disinformation.’ In fact, all government efforts in the MDM [misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation] sphere should end, since this clearly results in suppressing First Amendment protected speech.”

Under the Biden administration, White House staff made explicit requests for platforms to restrict COVID-19 related speech. Other agencies participated in speech suppression, with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) flagging posts for removal and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) forwarding misinformation reports from local election officials to platforms, a practice they called “switchboarding.”

CISA likewise helped create of the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, which the SIO played a key role in running, to monitor “misinformation” and report it to platforms during the 2020 election. A federal judge declined last week to dismiss a lawsuit against the SIO, along with several other groups, over their alleged targeting of conservative speech.

“Private entities cannot be permitted to partner with the government to censor Americans’ speech,” Nicholas R. Barry, America First Legal Senior Counsel, said in a statement.

Younes told the DCNF she would like to see “punishment for government actors who have violated Americans’ First Amendment rights.”

“At this time, such individuals manage to escape accountability for their actions because of doctrines like qualified immunity,” she said. “However, there can be exceptions to qualified immunity when government officials knowingly flout people’s civil rights, and those exceptions should be applied in the First Amendment context.”

Trump’s other suggestions included firing bureaucrats who have engaged in censorship, ensuring federal dollars do not go towards nonprofits and universities labeling domestic speech as misinformation and asking Congress to revise Section 230 to “get big online platforms out of censorship.”

The Biden administration has issued $267 million in grant funding for projects including the term “misinformation,” including $127 million specifically relating to COVID-19, according to a November Open The Books report. The DCNF reported in 2023 on several projects funded by the NSF to develop censorship tools, including a dashboard to forecast misinformation “trends” and another studying how misinformation influences online networks.

‘Smash This Censorship Cartel’

Many Trump nominees have been vocal about their commitment to promoting free speech.

Andrew Ferguson, who Trump selected as the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, said on War Room in late November that Trump can cut off some censorship outright, ordering officials to stop communicating with platforms and ending government funding for entities participating in speech suppression. But private censorship would likely move to “new fronts,” he noted, making it important for the FTC to take “investigative steps.”

Ferguson said “advertiser cartels” could violate antitrust laws by agreeing to boycott certain shows, podcasts and platforms.

“If the government is going to get out of the business here in the states of cooperating and colluding with the platforms to suppress the speech that they don’t like, then it’s up to the FTC to make sure that that sort of cooperation and collusion doesn’t move into the private sector,” Ferguson said.

Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brennan Carr likewise said in a NewsNation interview that one of his top priorities would be to “smash this censorship cartel.”

Other appointees took strong stances on censorship. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s choice for National Institute for Health (NIH) head, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration pushing back on COVID-19 lockdowns and responses. United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought his own lawsuit against the Biden administration for alleged First Amendment violations.

Harmeet Dhillon, who is set to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, worked with her firm on a case challenging the California Secretary of State’s Office coordination with Twitter to suppress speech.

Continued Litigation

While the Supreme Court found in June that plaintiffs who challenged the Biden administration’s censorship efforts failed to link their accounts’ restrictions to the government’s communications with platforms, the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit is ongoing. In November, the district court allowed the plaintiffs to pursue more discovery to establish the government’s involvement.

“Depending on the approach the Administration takes, it is conceivable that cases like ours could resolve in a consent decree, in which the government acknowledges its wrongdoing and takes various specific steps to safeguard against future violations of Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights,” Younes told the DCNF regarding the case.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) recently launched a new Center for Free Speech aimed at targeting censorship entities, pointing to the “new opportunity” free speech defenders will have as Trump takes office.

ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler told the DCNF the center is intended to create “substantial pushback on global censorship,” which he said has increased over the past decade by both private and government actors.

Potential targets include state level election laws, like the California laws targeting political satire that ADF already filed a lawsuit against on behalf of the Babylon Bee, along with debanking practices and other censorship by private actors.

“There is a lot of work to be done to dismantle this censorship industrial complex that’s been built up over many years,” Sechler told the DCNF.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Liberals gain support for ‘hate speech’ bill targeting Bible passages against homosexuality

Published on December 9, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The Bloc Québécois are now backing the hate-speech Bill C-9 in Canada after the Liberal government agreed to take away a religious exception.

A Liberal government bill to criminalize parts of the Bible dealing with homosexuality under Canada’s new “hate speech” laws looks closer to becoming reality after gaining the support of the Bloc Québécois party when a religious exception was removed.

The National Post reported that the Bloc Québécois are now backing the hate-speech Bill C-9 after the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to take away a religious exception.

Bill C-9, the Combating Hate Act, as reported by LifeSiteNews, has been blasted by constitutional experts as allowing empowered police and the government to go after those it deems to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, a government insider revealed that the Liberal government plans to remove religious exemptions from Canada’s hate-speech laws by modifying a bill. This would affect passages of the Bible dealing with homosexuality.

A recent media report states that the Carney Liberals and the separatist Bloc Québécois want to amend Bill C-9, which would “criminalize sections of the Bible, Quran, Torah, and other sacred texts,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre noted yesterday on X.

Both the Liberals and the Bloc are on board to support the removal of a religious exemption in Canada’s Criminal Code for the bill.

On Monday, Canadian Justice Minister Sean Fraser was rather mum on the deal made with the Bloc, which now says the deal is on thin ice due to canceled justice committee meetings.

Fraser said that it is his “priority” to see “this bill adopted,” but admitted it will need the support of other parties.

“That’s going to require that we collaborate with different parties who have different points of view,” he said.

Liberal MP Marc Miller had said earlier in the year that certain passages of the Bible are “hateful” because of what it says about homosexuality, and those who recite the passages should be jailed. As reported by LifeSiteNews, he was recently appointed as a government minister by Carney.

Canadian Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis blasted the Carney Liberals’ federal plan to criminalize parts of the Bible as an attack on “Christians,” warning it sets a “dangerous precedent” for Canadian society.

In response, the party launched a petition over fear that religious texts could be criminalized.

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The EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

Published on December 8, 2025

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By Christina Maas

Europe calls it transparency, but it looks a lot like teaching the internet who’s allowed to speak.

When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”
They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.
The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.
It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.
The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.
None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.
Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.
The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.
The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.
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However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.
The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.
Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.
Under the new X rules, everyone is on a level playing field.
Government officials and agencies now sport gray badges, symbols of credibility that can’t be purchased. These are the state’s chosen voices, publicly marked as incorruptible. To the EU, that should be a safeguard.
The second and third violations show how “transparency” doubles as a surveillance mechanism. X was fined for limiting access to advertising data and for restricting researchers from scraping platform content. Regulators called that obstruction. Musk called it refusing to feed the censorship machine.
The EU’s preferred researchers aren’t neutral archivists. Many have been documented coordinating with governments, NGOs, and “fact-checking” networks that flagged political content for takedown during previous election cycles.
They call it “fighting disinformation.” Critics call it outsourcing censorship pressure to academics.
Under the DSA, these same groups now have the legal right to demand data from platforms like X to study “systemic risks,” a phrase broad enough to include whatever speech bureaucrats find undesirable this month.
The result is a permanent state of observation where every algorithmic change, viral post, or trending topic becomes a potential regulatory case.
The advertising issue completes the loop. Brussels says it wants ad libraries to be fully searchable so users can see who’s paying for what. It gives regulators and activists a live feed of messaging, ready for pressure campaigns.
The DSA doesn’t delete ads; it just makes it easier for someone else to demand they be deleted.
That’s how this form of censorship works: not through bans, but through endless exposure to scrutiny until platforms remove the risk voluntarily.
The Commission insists, again and again, that the fine has “nothing to do with content.”
That may be true on a direct level, but the rules shape content all the same. When governments decide who counts as authentic, who qualifies as a researcher, and how visibility gets distributed, speech control doesn’t need to be explicit. It’s baked into the system.
Brussels calls it user protection. Musk calls it punishment for disobedience. This particular DSA fine isn’t about what you can say, it’s about who’s allowed to be heard saying it.
TikTok escaped similar scrutiny by promising to comply. X didn’t, and that’s the difference. The EU prefers companies that surrender before the hearing. When they don’t, “transparency” becomes the pretext for a financial hammer.
The €120 million fine is small by tech standards, but symbolically it’s huge.
It tells every platform that “noncompliance” means questioning the structure of speech the EU has already defined as safe.
In the official language of Brussels, this is a regulation. But it’s managed discourse, control through design, moderation through paperwork, censorship through transparency.
And the louder they insist it isn’t, the clearer it becomes that it is.
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With your help, we can do more than hold the line. We can push back. We can expose censorship, highlight surveillance overreach, and amplify the voices of those being silenced.
If you have found value in our work, please consider becoming a supporter.
Your support does more than keep us independent. It also gives you access to exclusive content, deep dive exploration of freedom focused technology, member-only features, and practical how-to posts that help you protect your rights in the real world.
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