A year ago today, President Trump issued an Executive Order that deputized federal agencies to retaliate against online social media services on his b

Newly Released Records Show How Trump Tried to Retaliate Against Social Media For Fact-Checking

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2021-05-28 13:30:14

A year ago today, President Trump issued an Executive Order that deputized federal agencies to retaliate against online social media services on his behalf, a disturbing and unconstitutional attack on internet free expression.

To mark this ignoble anniversary, EFF and the Center for Democracy & Technology are making records from their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over the Executive Order public. The records show how Trump planned to leverage more than $117 million worth of government online advertising to stop platforms from fact-checking or otherwise moderating his speech.

Although the documents released thus far do not disclose whether government officials cut federal advertising as the Executive Order directed, they do show that the agencies’ massive online advertising budgets could easily be manipulated to coerce private platforms into adopting the president or the government’s preferred political views.

President Trump’s Executive Order was as unconstitutional as it was far-reaching. It directed independent agencies like the FCC to start a rulemaking to undermine legal protections for users’ speech online. It also ordered the Department of Justice to review online advertising spending by all federal agencies to consider whether certain platforms receiving that money were “problematic vehicles for government speech.”