By ALI SWENSON
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday ordered that no federal officer, employee or agent may unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen, an early step toward his campaign promise to dismantle what he called government “censorship” of U.S. citizens.
The president’s executive order, issued just hours after he was sworn in to a second term, comes after Trump and his supporters have accused the federal government of pressuring social media companies to take down lawful posts over concerns around misinformation.
The order also instructs the attorney general, in consultation with other executive agency heads, to investigate how federal government actions over the four years of the Biden administration could have infringed on free speech and propose “remedial actions” based on the findings.
Trump’s order, which he signed onstage at Capital One Arena along with a slate of other executive actions, shows how motivated he is to crack down on what he calls the “censorship cartel” on his first day in office.
It’s a winning stance among his supporters, many of whom feel that the federal government has unfairly targeted lawful speech from right-wing voices.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently echoed that accusation, saying senior Biden administration officials pressured his employees to inappropriately “censor” content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elon Musk, the owner of the social platform X, has accused the FBI of illegally coercing Twitter before his tenure to suppress a story about Hunter Biden.
While former Twitter executives conceded they made a mistake by blocking that story just before the 2020 presidential election, they have adamantly denied that they acted in response to government pressure.
The order does not acknowledge the gravity of harmful online falsehoods, which have increasingly snowballed into real-world threats, harassment and targeted violence. Four years ago, Trump’s own torrent of lies about the 2020 election prompted threats against election officials and culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It’s not yet clear how the order could affect the work that several U.S. agencies do to track false claims that pose threats to U.S. safety or election security, including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Trump’s order focuses on Americans’ speech. It’s too soon to tell how that will influence the way federal agencies communicate with social media companies about false claims that originate abroad. Many disinformation campaigns from U.S. adversaries, which have targeted voters, are promoted online by American citizens.
Trump has styled himself as a champion of free expression since his first presidency, when he lashed out at the social platform then known as Twitter for posting fact-check labels on his tweets about mail-in ballots.
At the same time, he frequently targets the press, calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” and has threatened to seek retribution against the news media in his second administration, including suggesting that the broadcast licenses of certain television news networks should be pulled.
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