BY TYLER DURDEN
THURSDAY, JAN 09, 2025 – 09:30 PM
Authored by Ben Weingarten via RealClearInvestigations,
The incoming Trump administration scored an early but possibly illusory victory last month in its effort to reform government overreach when it successfully pressured Congress to eliminate what it termed “sweetheart provisions for government censors” from a measure to stave off a government shutdown.
Funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – which Republicans had attacked as a tool of domestic censorship – was stripped from the final bill, and the center announced that it was closed for good on Dec. 23. Days later, however, reporting emerged that the State Department had devised plans to shift the center’s 51 employees and millions of dollars of funding to a separate hub purportedly to counter foreign “information manipulation and interference.”
President-elect Donald Trump has not said how he will respond to this maneuver. But in extensive public comments he has said that targeting what critics have called the Censorship Industrial Complex will be a high priority in his new administration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to restore free expression on his platforms and join the Trump administration in its efforts to push back on global censorship, two weeks before inauguration day, indicates speech-policing forces like his may be disarming accordingly.
As the State Department’s move suggests, however, this push will likely face stiff resistance. “There will be a visceral reaction from the bureaucratic state in permanent Washington,” Sen. Eric Schmitt told RealClearInvestigations. As attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt launched the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against federal government collusion with social media companies and nonprofits to target disfavored speech.
Trump outlined the steps he might pursue in a December 2022 video detailing his “Free Speech Policy Initiative” – a video that, ironically, received less attention originally because YouTube had banned the former president. Responding to what he called “a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” that have “conspire[d] to manipulate and silence the American People … [and] collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health,” Trump vowed to “dismantle and destroy” the “censorship cartel,” including through the use of vigorous executive action starting within hours of his inauguration.
According to the Free Speech Policy Initiative, his administration’s efforts will include:
- A first-day executive order barring federal authorities from colluding with others to abridge Americans’ protected speech
- Preventing federal dollars from being used to classify domestic speech as mis- or dis-information, and from being lavished on nonprofits and academic institutions engaging in similar efforts, including “flagging” posts to social media platforms for suppression
- Identifying and firing bureaucrats across the federal government who have engaged in direct or indirect censorship, while enacting laws imposing criminal penalties on such conduct
- Directing the Department of Justice to probe participants in the “new online censorship regime” for myriad potential violations of law
- Working with Congress to pass legislation modifying Section 230 of the Communications Act to extend its liability shield only to those large online platforms meeting high standards of “neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination”
- Helping to pass a digital Bill of Rights, including a right to due process requiring government officials to obtain a court order to remove online content
Please read more at the below link:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-trump-plans-take-censors-and-they-plan-take-trump