Government Officials Who Engaged In Censorship Must Be Held Accountable

It’s one thing to hear the alarm go off … and another to roll out of bed and hit the ground running. After several years of increasing revelations about the growing complex of private enterprises, non-profit organizations, and governments — federal and state — that have been censoring Americans’ speech, it’s refreshing to see political leadership that throws back the covers and confronts the danger head-on.

Our newly re-elected president, to his credit, seems clear-eyed on what we’re facing. “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country — it’s as simple as that,” now President Donald Trump told the nation shortly after the November election. “If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple … like dominoes.”

Few people in the public eye have as much reason as the president to take seriously the blunt instrument of political censorship being wielded against all Americans by the federal government, its blue state allies, and their private enterprise proxies. Even fewer are in so ideal a position to do something about that threat.

The mere fact that Trump is beginning his second term signals his remarkable personal triumph over the massive campaign of censorship hurled against him over the last 10 years. He was still serving his first term when he found himself removed from Facebook, invisible on Google, and locked out of what was then called Twitter.

“This censorship is unlawful, it’s unconstitutional, and it’s completely un-American,” he said in 2021, announcing a class-action lawsuit against the three platforms. “We’re demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well.” Four years don’t seem to have assuaged his determination to lay an axe to the roots of the problem.

He won’t be swinging his axe alone. Another key member of the incoming administration, Elon Musk, has already taken some major initiatives, buying Twitter and rebranding it as “X,” after raising his own questions about political censorship on major social media platforms.

And Rep. Jim Jordan’s congressional subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has released multiple reports—including one last month detailing the Biden administration’s largely successful “monthslong campaign … to coerce large companies … to censor books, videos, posts, and other content online.” This campaign, the committee’s report concluded, “needlessly imposed harm and suffering on Americans across the country.”

Earlier this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly confirmed those findings, describing how Biden administration officials angrily and aggressively demanded that Facebook remove Covid-related content, “even things that were facts, or memes and humor. When we refused, we found ourselves under investigation by several agencies.” His was one of many social media platforms, he admitted, that buckled under the government’s pressure.

In fact, these revelations are only the tip of a very large iceberg. In recent years, an illegal Cold War against unwelcome messaging and messengers has targeted schoolchildren, college students, teachers, counselors, artists, pregnancy care centers, churches, ministries, and humor websites all over the country, intimidating ordinary Americans through everything from job termination to de-banking, and with threats of costly fines and even jail time.

But recognizing the threat — like hearing the alarm — isn’t enough. Someone has to rise to challenges posed by this Censorship Industrial Complex to cut Americans off from news, information, and viewpoints that some in positions of power and authority don’t want them to have.

Fighting this good fight is going to require significant and concentrated effort by the executive and legislative branches to root out the offenders — even within the federal government itself. All records evidencing governmental attempts to censor speech should be made public — after all, those records belong to the American people. The officials who acted to infringe rights of free speech must be held accountable. And each leader in every government agency must make one thing abundantly clear: state power may never be used to censor, limit, or diminish protected speech — it’s that simple.

Thankfully, the incoming administration seems intent on pursuing all these actions — and keenly aware of the stakes. “The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America,” Trump recently said, “and for the survival of Western Civilization itself.”

So the president himself has sounded the alarm, most recently through his executive orders. Here’s hoping the rest of this administration won’t be caught napping.

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Philip A. Sechler is senior counsel and director of the Center for Free Speech at Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.