The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday said it was launching an inquiry into Big Tech “censorship,” without naming specific companies it is looking into.
New FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson, who was selected by President Donald Trump to replace Lina Khan in January, announced the decision.
“Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” Ferguson said in a statement. “This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”
The inquiry comes after a number of major tech executives — including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Apple chief Tim Cook — were prominently featured at Trump’s inauguration last month. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was also in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration; his appearance came just months before Google faces a remedies trial in April after it was found by a federal judge to have broken antitrust laws.
Tech censorship has been a hot topic in recent years. Twitter, under previous ownership, blocked the New York Post from sharing reports on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election; that decision was one of the key drivers in Elon Musk acquiring the platform, now dubbed X, in 2022.
Another prominent case was in early 2021, when Trump was indefinitely banned from Facebook and Instagram, following the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot. At the time, Zuckerberg said the “risks” of keeping the president on his platforms was “simply too great.” Meta later reinstated Trump’s accounts in 2023. Other platforms banned Trump following the insurrection as well, including Twitter — a decision that was reversed when Musk bought the company.
More recently, Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan last month that the Biden Administration pressured Meta to block what it deemed misinformation about COVID.
“I’m generally pretty pro-rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
“But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true, right?” he continued. “I mean, they basically pushed us and said anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like, well, we’re not going to do that. We’re clearly not going to do that.”
On Thursday, the FTC said citizens will have until May 21 to submit comments on tech censorship.
“The FTC is interested in understanding how consumers — including by potentially unfair or deceptive acts or practices, or potentially unfair methods of competition — have been harmed by the policies of tech firms,” the commission said.
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