Former President Donald Trump vowed Thursday that he will ban the federal government from using the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” to describe domestic speech if he retakes the White House.
The 76-year-old Trump made the pledge as part of a broader “free speech” platform announced in a video policy statement shared with The Post — vowing also to impose a seven-year ban on former FBI and CIA workers handling private-sector US consumer records.
Trump said this month’s “Twitter Files” releases “confirmed that a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American People.”
“The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed — and it must happen immediately,” Trump said in the video, which is expected to be the first in a series of policy announcements as part of his 2024 presidential campaign.
Some of Trump’s proposals — such as limiting Section 230 legal immunity for tech platforms unless they act with political neutrality — were pushed by the 45th president since his time in office, while others would forge new ground.
Trump said that one of his first acts as the 47th president in January 2025 would be to prohibit federal policing of lawful domestic speech.
“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” he said.
“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”
Although barring the use of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” would be a dramatic break from the Biden administration — which has admitted to “flagging” posts for Facebook to censor while allegedly operating social media tip-lines with deletion requests — it also is in line with the stance of First Amendment advocates from across the political spectrum.
The left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union, for example, said in response to an Oct. 31 report by The Intercept about federal pressure on social media to censor content: “The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere.”
Trump announced his third consecutive presidential candidacy on Nov. 15 but has kept a relatively low profile without his trademark rallies and without the blanket media coverage that defined his first bid in 2015 and 2016. He faces potentially stiff competition for the 2024 GOP nomination, including a possible bid by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The former president’s first month as a 2024 candidate was buffeted by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel, veteran prosecutor Jack Smith, to lead investigations into Trump’s role in challenging the 2020 election results and his handling of classified records since leaving office. Trump has faced controversy for dining with rapper Kanye West, despite his recent record of anti-Jewish remarks, and West’s white supremacist associate Nick Fuentes.
Trump’s Big Tech free speech appeal includes proposals to throttle federal funds for universities that partnered with companies to censor speech as well as a seven-year ban on working in Big Tech by “deep staters” — an apparent nod to new Twitter CEO Elon Musk firing former FBI general counsel Jim Baker for allegedly throwing up internal resistance to transparency about past censorship decisions.
The ex-president also pitched a Digital Bill of Rights that “should include a right to digital due process — in other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.”
Trump said the proposed manifesto would include the rights to be notified if large online platforms remove, shadow ban or otherwise restrict their accounts, along with a right to an explanation and an ability to appeal. It’s unclear if mandated speech tolerance by companies would withstand potential First Amendment litigation.
“In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose,” Trump said.
Trump lost access to the largest US communications platforms — including Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube — after last year’s Capitol riot, in which a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to challenge the certification of President Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. Musk restored Trump’s Twitter account last month, but he has yet to tweet.
Ahead of the riot, social media networks labeled a number of Trump’s posts alleging widespread election fraud to be “misinformation.” Those allegations of fraud were rejected by courts and state election officials.
Trump launched his own microblogging platform, Truth Social, in February.
Opponents of online censorship note that speech deemed to be “misinformation” or “disinformation” can later gain widespread acceptance. For example, Facebook banned discussion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s possible role in the COVID-19 pandemic until mid-2021. Government officials who had steered funding toward risky research at the lab said it was an unfounded conspiracy theory, but it later gained broader credibility — including from US spy agencies — as one of two possible explanations for the pandemic’s origin.
