Donald Trump said on Thursday that if he is elected president in four years, he will reverse the suppression of free speech in the United States.
Trump, who lost his White House reelection bid in 2020, promised in a videotaped address that he would target government agencies and employees, universities and tech companies with a series of executive orders.
Trump promised to ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as'mis-' or 'dis-information.'
The Republican, who is prone to linguistic hyperbole and over-promising, said that the censorship Cartel must be dismantled and destroyed.
The rotten system of censorship and information control will be torn out of the system when I become president. He said there would be nothing left.
For years, Trump and other right-wing figures have claimed that they are the victims of efforts to limit their speech by so-called "deep state" actors.
The release earlier this month of what Musk called the "Twitter files" to support claims that the company's prior management handled content moderation in a way that was biased against conservatives gave more fuel to those claims. The New York Post story about the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the son of the president, was temporarily suppressed by the social media company.
Musk said that the social network interfered with the elections in the U.S. The records from CNBC and The New York Times weren't responded to.
According to some studies, the social media platform elevated conservative news and voices over liberals.
Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning federal agencies from colluding with others to censor or limit lawful speech by individuals.
He said he would start a process to identify and fire federal bureaucrats who engage in domestic censorship.
He ordered the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified.
Potential criminal civil regulatory and constitutional offenses include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law and antitrust laws.
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science at University of Mary Washington, dismissed Trump's proposals as "something to generate energy among his supporters".
If the plan came to that, it wouldn't succeed legislatively or judicially. He said that Trump was trying to change the narrative after many of his candidates lost.
The former president is not a good choice to dictate the terms of discourse in the country due to his fast and loose connection with the truth.
Ian Ostrander, associate political science professor at Michigan State University, said that if Trump were re-elected, he could use executive orders to change government policy.
In an email to CNBC, Ostrander said that making drastic and enduring changes can be difficult.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects websites from being sued over content posted by their users.
Just as there is no guarantee that Trump will be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024, or that he will win a general election contest, there is no guarantee that he will follow through on any of the promises he made.
When he was president, Trump was frustrated by his inability to force the Department of Justice to do things he wanted done, such as reversing his election loss to Biden, and was enraged by the department appointing a special counsel, Robert Muller, to investigate his 2016 campaign.
Congress overrode Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act because it did not include Section 230.
The report was contributed to by CNBC.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
