Category Archives: censorship

Several important responses have come up recently in reaction to the Trump administration’s new wave of pressure on the media in the winter of 2025.

Jameel Jaffer,  director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, expressed concern in a New York Times op-ed over noted US Judge Learned Hand’s “Spirit of Liberty” speech while considering the acquiescent media’s responses to Trump’s laughable libel suits.  Hand said: 

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is sending NBC News and the New York Times out from standard Pentagon offices and replacing them with partisan media outlets Brietbart and the NY Post. This will seriously undermine the public’s right to know, said Kevin Baron and Price Floyd of the Washington Post.

Also responding to new developments, former Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan,  noted the lack of competition between the big tech / media industries that put Trump into power.

It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.

Another episode of pressure on the media involves  Executive Order 14172  of Jan. 20, 2025, directing federal agencies to adopt the name “Gulf of America” for the body of water that had been called the “Gulf of Mexico” for at least 300 years.  Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, and several U.S.-based media outlets such as USA Today, Axios, and Fox News adopted the change.  One organization that did not adopt the change was the Associated Press, which said that since it serves and international audience, it would not be. appropriate to reflect a US-only name change.  In order to coerce the Associated Press to use the “Gulf of America” name, the Trump administration ordered that AP reporters and photographers be banned from all government news conferences and events.  The AP sued in federal court but was unable to secure an immediate injunction against the discriminatory and coercive policy.  The problem is that this is an ancient form of viewpoint discrimination called compelled speech. (For more on the topic see “Compelled Speech” on this site).

The AP issue involved more than simply having reporters access White House events, according to Julie Pace, AP executive editor. “It was about whether the government can tell a news organization, or anyone, what language to use and if they don’t comply, retaliate against them.”

On April 8, a federal court ordered the White House to remove restrictions on the AP.

The Supreme Court stopped a temporary injunction to block the Biden administration’s ongoing conversations about disinformation with social media companies on Oct. 20, 2023.

This leaves federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control free to attempt to influence  social media companies in order to  (as the administration says) “mitigate the hazards of online misinformation” by flagging content that violated the social media platforms’ own policies.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana have contended in Murthy v Missouri (aka Missouri v Biden) that the government “coerced, threatened, and pressured social-media platforms to censor” them, in violation of the First Amendment.  US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is named as a defendant in the suit.  Evidence of this pressure campaign  emerged when the Twitter Files were released after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and took over company management on Oct. 27, 2022.  CNN published an article about the Twitter Files Dec. 2, 2022.

See SCOTUS Blog, Justices Allow Continued Communication …
Also: FIRE Statement on Murthy v Missouri being granted cert

George Orwell, journalist and author of “1984”

“Big Tech is not the Ministry of Truth.”
Or at least, so says the Attorney  General of Alabama  who has invited citizens to file formal complaints if they have been censored on social media.

“It should concern us all when platforms that hold such tremendous power and influence over information wield that power in contradiction of—and with undisguised disdain for—the foundational American principles of free speech and freedom of the press,” says Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. “The censorship campaign currently being waged by giant corporate oligarchs like Facebook and Twitter is, in a word, un-American.”

You may recall that in Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth controls news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Of course, truth is only what the ministry says it is.   Speaking up for some idea that is not “true”  is punishable by death or indefinite  imprisonment.

But it’s just a novel.  It may go without saying, but here in the US at least, nobody’s life is on the line and nobody is headed for Siberia for some crackpot  Q-nut idea they want to shout to the world.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have blocked or even banned a few US citizens who insist on deadly lies, for example, that the last election was fraudulent;  that vaccines don’t work; that the virus  is a hoax; that masks are the “mark of the beast;” and so on.  Facebook and Twitter are trying to apply a standard of human dignity and provable truth through their terms of service.

Don’t like it?  Fine. Go to the competition.  There are dozens of new social media platforms, according to a July 2021 article in Forbes.  You don’t even have to pay for a subscription. Jeez.

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