Trump signs executive order against ‘censorship’

The US president has accused his predecessor of abusing the law under the pretext of fighting “disinformation”.

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning government officials from violating the freedom of speech under the guise of fighting misinformation.

Trump signed a flurry of orders hours after he was sworn in as the 47th president on Monday.

In the document, Trump accused his predecessor, Joe Biden, of “censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms” and pressuring social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve.”

“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” the document says.

Trump tasked the authorities to “ensure that no federal government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

Trump’s allies have long accused the government of wielding its power to silence dissenting views online, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. In 2020, Twitter and Facebook briefly cracked down on the sharing of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Republicans described the incident as an act of censorship.

Internal communication published by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X, revealed that the FBI had asked Twitter to take down accounts it said were spreading election misinformation.

Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this month that the authorities had pressured his platform to delete materials that were deemed Covid misinformation, including memes about vaccination.