Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship

Summary

The Executive Order (EO) prohibits any Federal Government employee or officer from engaging in “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” It states that the Biden administration “trampled free speech rights” by censoring online speech, notably through “exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” It references the previous administration doing this under the guise of “combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” subsequently infringing on constitutionally protected speech rights to advance their own narratives.

It further states that “no taxpayer resources are [to be] used to…facilitate any conduct” that would unconstitutionally abridge free speech. It also requires the Attorney General to “investigate the activities of the Federal Government over the last 4 years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies of this order and prepare a report to be submitted to the President.” The report is expected to include “recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken...”

The EO closely aligns with a “Free Speech Policy Initiative” released by the Trump campaign in 2022. The social media post and video appeared to come in response to the Twitter files, which were released in early December 2022, and possibly the Murthy v. Missouri case, which stemmed from a lawsuit filed in the Summer of 2022. In the video, then-candidate Trump states that he will sign an Executive Order banning “any federal department…from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens” and any “federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information.” Trump also pledged to “begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship…directly or indirectly.”

In addition, Trump called for the “Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the... online censorship regime” and to “aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified,” including “possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses.”