“I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” President Donald Trump told Congress in March. “It’s back.”
He was referring to one of the many executive orders he signed on inauguration day: “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
“The previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms,” said the order, which claimed efforts to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation” have “infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.”
Trump was referring to past efforts by social media platforms to combat false claims about the 2020 election, COVID vaccines and conspiracy theories. Conservatives were the leading sources of many of the falsehoods, and efforts by social media companies to limit such content fed into claims that conservatives were the victims of viewpoint discrimination.
“Pro-family” groups applauded Trump’s free speech order.
“We no longer have a government that will limit free speech under the guise of ‘fact-checking’ and protection from ‘disinformation’ in service of their pernicious ideologies,” said Focus on the Family.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful conservative Christian legal group Focus helped found, also cheered Trump’s actions. ADF has been crying out about liberal “censorship” of conservatives for years. Now, ADF is aiding Trump’s efforts to root out alleged censors in the U.S. and around the world.
Last year, ADF created a new Center for Free Speech. “The American people have a right to know if their tax dollars were used to create censorship tools to suppress certain voices,” said the Center’s director.
“Our mission is simple: We will work to ensure that everyone’s right to free speech is secured, and we will take on those bent on censoring the speech of others,” ADF said in a December announcement.
In February, ADF promoted the cause to members of the National Religious Broadcasters during a session titled, “Understanding the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
That lingo comes straight from GOP leaders. In May 2024, a House of Representatives committee on the “weaponization” of the federal government held hearings and issued a report on “The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration.”
ADF says big tech censorship has harmed people who oppose abortion, groups promoting abortion reversal pills, and pro-life pregnancy centers.
ADF is currently involved in three “censorship” lawsuits involving the satirical site The Babylon Bee; the streaming and web hosting platform Rumble, which hosts Trump’s Truth Social; and Sage Publications, which publishes medical and academic journals.
ADF is busy fighting many other “censorship” battles, including:
- Suing to overturn two Kansas laws that ban “conversion therapy” for homosexual people who no longer want to be homosexual
- Requesting records from universities for their alleged participation in the Censorship-Industrial Complex
- Investigating free speech violations in government agencies, including science agencies, the Commerce Department, and USAID
- Investigating the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, which researches misinformation
- Fighting the University of Memphis so that it would permit students to hear a Turning Point USA presentation featuring Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a conservative hero after fatally shooting two men during protests in Kenosha, Wis.
Elsewhere around the world, ADF and ADF International are:
- Lobbying against the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which was enacted to “prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation”
- Criticizing Australia for censoring posts on X that criticize transgender people
But ADF’s commitment to “everyone’s” right to free speech has its limits. In Kansas, ADF and Kansas Family Voice, a Focus on the Family affiliate, support the “Given Name Act,” which requires school employees to use pronouns consistent with students’ birth certificates, thus prohibiting them from using other pronouns chosen by students.
Some critics say Trump is a poor leader for any campaign against censorship because the only free speech he loves is his own, and because he is leading what one editorial called “The MAGA War on Free Speech.”
The New York Times summarized some of Trump’s key censorious actions in a recent report, writing that Trump has “quarreled with universities over speech on their campuses, arrested pro-Palestinian activists, ousted journalists from the White House press pool, canceled identity-related holidays at federal institutions and instituted policies that led to banned books in certain schools — moves that have alarmed free speech watchdogs.”
The Trump administration has banned words including “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from government websites. Federal agencies have flagged hundreds of additional terms to avoid, including “accessible,” “belong,” “Black,” “clean energy,” “cultural sensitivity,” “disability,” “female,” “gender,” “historically,” “institutional,” “mental health,” “minority,” “political,” “race,” “sex,” “sociocultural,” “trauma,” “undervalued,” “victim,” and women, the Times reported.
Meanwhile, the content controls on social media and websites that angered conservatives have been largely abandoned. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, ended its fact-checking programs in January. YouTube also stopped removing most problematic videos, according to a Times report.
The National Coalition Against Censorship, a network of 59 national nonprofit organizations, says, “Censorship happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their political or moral values on others by suppressing words, images or ideas that they find offensive.”
NCAS says the word “censor” originated in ancient Rome, “where the government appointed officials to take the census and to supervise public morals.”
The word has retained some of that original meaning — official government efforts to control what people do — but has been expanded to include private companies’ efforts to control content on their sites or networks.
