The Claim

Directed agencies to dismantle Biden-era federal censorship operations, restoring free speech protections.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

That the administration issued directives to federal agencies requiring them to dismantle specific programs or operations from the Biden era that constituted “censorship,” and that these actions restored free speech protections that had been diminished.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That the Biden administration ran “censorship operations” — a term implying organized, systematic suppression of constitutionally protected speech. That these operations were illegal or unconstitutional. That free speech was meaningfully restricted under Biden and is now meaningfully restored. That the current administration is a defender of the First Amendment.

What is conspicuously absent?

The Supreme Court’s actual ruling on the matter. In Murthy v. Missouri (2024), the Court — in a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett — found that plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge government-platform communications, declining to rule that the Biden administration’s contacts with social media companies constituted censorship. What the claim calls “censorship operations” were largely government communications with platforms about content moderation — activities the Supreme Court found the plaintiffs could not demonstrate were coercive rather than persuasive.

Also absent: any acknowledgment that the administration claiming to “restore free speech” has, by documented count, committed nearly 200 actions threatening First Amendment protections in its first year — including press bans, threats to broadcast licenses, targeting of critics through executive orders, arrests of student protesters, revoking journalist subpoena protections, and using federal funding as leverage against universities.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

The administration signed Executive Order 14149, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” on January 20, 2025. The order states that no federal employee shall engage in conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen,” prohibits taxpayer resources from being used for such activities, and directs the Attorney General to investigate the previous administration’s activities and recommend remedial actions. The order is notably vague on enforcement mechanisms — Section 4 specifies it creates “no enforceable legal rights.” It does not identify specific programs by name or define what constituted “censorship.” ¹

The Biden administration did coordinate with social media platforms on content moderation, particularly around COVID-19 misinformation and election integrity. White House officials publicly and privately urged platforms to address vaccine misinformation. CISA’s election security team flagged potential misinformation to platforms. The Global Engagement Center funded research organizations studying disinformation, including the Global Disinformation Index. The House Judiciary Committee’s “Weaponization” subcommittee documented extensive communications between government officials and platforms. These contacts ranged from routine information sharing to pointed pressure, with internal platform communications showing frustration at government requests. ²

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Murthy v. Missouri (June 26, 2024) that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge these government-platform communications. Justice Barrett’s majority opinion held that the plaintiffs — Missouri, Louisiana, and individual social media users — failed to demonstrate a “substantial risk” of imminent injury traceable to specific government defendants. The Court did not rule on whether the communications constituted censorship or violated the First Amendment. It explicitly did not address the merits. Justice Alito’s dissent, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, argued the majority was ignoring evidence of government coercion, writing that “government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government.” ³

The administration dismantled or defunded multiple programs it characterized as censorship infrastructure. Specific actions include: (1) CISA’s misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation teams had members placed on administrative leave and the election security program was eliminated, with 14 positions and approximately $39.6 million cut; (2) the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, established in 2017 to counter foreign election interference, was disbanded by AG Bondi in February 2025; (3) the State Department’s R/FIMI office (successor to the Global Engagement Center) was shut down in April 2025, with all approximately 40 employees placed on paid leave; (4) the NSF terminated over 400 grants worth approximately $328 million, including dozens focused on misinformation research, deepfake detection, and election security; (5) the DOJ revoked Biden-era protections for journalists in leak investigations. ⁴

The Global Engagement Center had already closed in December 2024 — before Trump took office — after Congress declined to renew its authorization. The GEC’s authorization expired on December 23, 2024, when the GOP-led Congress did not include renewal in the National Defense Authorization Act. The center’s successor, R/FIMI, was created at the end of 2024 and operated only briefly before the Trump administration shut it down in April 2025. Secretary Rubio alleged without evidence that R/FIMI was “used to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans.” ⁵

The administration simultaneously took actions that directly threatened free speech and press freedom. A Free Press report documented nearly 200 First Amendment-threatening actions in 2025, including: banning AP journalists from the White House for refusing to use “Gulf of America” (ruled a First Amendment violation by a Trump-appointed judge); threatening broadcast license revocations over critical coverage; FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening TV networks’ licenses over Iran war coverage; revoking Chris Krebs’ security clearance and ordering a DOJ investigation for his role validating the 2020 election; arresting student protesters including lawful permanent residents based on political speech; threatening federal funding cuts to universities; scrubbing thousands of government web pages of specific language; ordering removal of “improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums; and revoking Biden-era journalist subpoena protections. ⁶

The executive order targeting Chris Krebs explicitly linked “censorship” accusations to political retaliation against election integrity work. On April 9, 2025, Trump signed a presidential memorandum revoking Krebs’ security clearance, ordering a DOJ investigation, and suspending clearances at SentinelOne (the cybersecurity company where Krebs worked). The White House fact sheet stated this addressed “Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship,” referencing CISA’s election security work under Krebs as the basis for the action. Krebs resigned from SentinelOne on April 16, stating he was leaving to “push back on Trump’s efforts to go after corporate interests and corporate relationships.” ⁷

Strong Inferences

The administration’s definition of “censorship” is selectively applied — targeting government communication with platforms while the administration itself engages in far more direct speech suppression. The programs labeled as “censorship” — CISA flagging misinformation to platforms, the GEC funding disinformation research, the FBI monitoring foreign influence operations — involved government entities providing information to private companies that then made their own content moderation decisions. The administration’s own actions — banning reporters, threatening broadcast licenses, arresting protesters, revoking security clearances for political speech, defunding research on politically inconvenient topics — involve direct government power being used to suppress or punish speech. The first category involves persuasion (possibly crossing into pressure); the second involves state coercion. By any First Amendment standard, the administration’s actions are more constitutionally concerning than the programs it dismantled. ⁸

The dismantling of these programs primarily serves to remove oversight mechanisms that could detect and expose foreign influence operations and domestic misinformation — not to protect free speech. The FBI Foreign Influence Task Force monitored Russian, Chinese, and Iranian election interference. CISA’s election security team helped states defend against foreign cyberattacks and disinformation. The GEC/R/FIMI tracked foreign propaganda campaigns. NSF-funded research detected deepfakes and studied how misinformation spreads. Eliminating these programs does not give any American more freedom to speak; it gives foreign adversaries and domestic bad actors more freedom to manipulate information environments without detection. Election security experts warn the 2026 midterms may resemble the less-protected 2016 cycle rather than the better-defended 2020 and 2024 elections. ⁹

Meta’s January 2025 decision to end its fact-checking program — announced before the inauguration — reflects corporate anticipation of the incoming administration’s preferences rather than executive action. Zuckerberg announced on January 7, 2025, that Meta would replace its third-party fact-checking program with a “Community Notes” model, citing the election as a “cultural tipping point.” This occurred before EO 14149 was signed but after it was clear what the administration’s posture would be. The claim implicitly takes credit for platform decisions that were voluntary corporate choices made in anticipation of political pressure — the same dynamic the executive order claims to oppose. ¹⁰

What the Evidence Shows

The factual core of this claim is real but narrowly so: the administration did sign an executive order and take concrete steps to dismantle programs it characterized as “federal censorship operations.” EO 14149 established a policy against government interference with protected speech. Multiple programs were shut down, defunded, or had staff removed — CISA’s misinformation teams, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the State Department’s R/FIMI, and hundreds of NSF research grants.

But the claim’s framing — that these were “censorship operations” whose dismantling “restored free speech protections” — does not survive scrutiny. The Supreme Court, in Murthy v. Missouri, specifically declined to find that the Biden administration’s platform communications constituted censorship, ruling that plaintiffs could not even establish standing to bring the claim. The programs dismantled were primarily engaged in tracking foreign influence operations, providing cybersecurity support to election officials, and funding academic research — not suppressing Americans’ constitutionally protected speech. No American was prosecuted, fined, or legally penalized for their speech under any of these programs.

The deepest problem with this claim is the chasm between its rhetoric and the administration’s own conduct. An administration genuinely committed to free speech would not ban reporters for word choices, threaten broadcast licenses over critical coverage, revoke security clearances as political retaliation, arrest student protesters for op-eds, defund universities over ideology, scrub government websites of disfavored terms, or remove journalist protections from leak investigations. The Free Press organization documented nearly 200 government actions threatening the First Amendment in the administration’s first year alone — each involving direct state power rather than the indirect government-to-platform communication that the executive order condemns.

What the administration calls “restoring free speech” is more precisely described as: removing the government’s capacity to monitor and counter foreign information warfare, eliminating research infrastructure that studied how misinformation spreads, and dismantling election security programs that helped defend democratic processes — while simultaneously expanding the government’s direct use of coercive power against disfavored speech. The programs destroyed protected Americans from foreign adversaries; the powers expanded protect the administration from domestic criticism.

The Bottom Line

The steel-man case: the Biden administration did engage in aggressive government-platform coordination that made many First Amendment scholars uncomfortable. Some communications crossed from information sharing into pressure, and reasonable people can disagree about where the line between persuasion and coercion lies. The Disinformation Governance Board (created and abandoned in 2022) was a genuine overreach in institutional design, even if it never became operational. EO 14149’s stated principle — that the government should not unconstitutionally suppress citizen speech — is uncontroversial.

But the claim that this administration “restored free speech protections” is contradicted by its own actions on nearly 200 documented occasions. The programs it dismantled were primarily defensive infrastructure against foreign adversaries, not censorship mechanisms aimed at Americans. The Supreme Court explicitly declined to rule that the targeted programs constituted censorship. And the administration’s simultaneous expansion of direct government coercion against press, protesters, academics, and political opponents represents a far greater threat to the First Amendment than anything the Biden administration did through platform communications. This is a case where the rhetoric of free speech is being deployed as cover for the dismantling of accountability infrastructure and the expansion of executive power over public discourse.

Footnotes

1. Executive Order 14149, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” January 20, 2025. Federal Register, 90 FR 8243-8244, January 28, 2025. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/28/2025-01902/restoring-freedom-of-speech-and-ending-federal-censorship. White House text: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-freedom-of-speech-and-ending-federal-censorship/. ↩

2. House Judiciary Committee Republicans, “Weaponization Committee Exposes the Biden White House Censorship Regime,” 2024, https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponization-committee-exposes-biden-white-house-censorship-regime-new-report. NPR, “What’s behind a Trump executive order ending ‘censorship,’” January 24, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/01/24/nx-s1-5270071/eo-weaponization. CNN, “Biden administration defends communications with social media companies,” August 10, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/tech/biden-administration-social-media-contacts/index.html. ↩

3. Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024). Supreme Court opinion, June 26, 2024, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf. SCOTUSblog analysis: https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-side-with-biden-over-governments-influence-on-social-media-content-moderation/. EFF analysis: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/supreme-court-dodges-key-question-murthy-v-missouri-and-dismisses-case-failing. ↩

4. CyberScoop, “CISA election, disinformation officials placed on administrative leave,” February 2025, https://cyberscoop.com/cisa-misinformation-disinformation-administrative-leave/. CyberScoop, “DOJ disbands foreign influence task force, limits scope of FARA prosecutions,” February 2025, https://cyberscoop.com/doj-disbands-foreign-influence-task-force/. MIT Technology Review, “The State Department office countering foreign disinformation is being eliminated,” April 16, 2025, https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1115256/us-office-that-counters-foreign-disinformation-is-being-eliminated-say-officials/. Nextgov/FCW, “NSF cancels over 400 grants covering disinformation, deepfakes and STEM education,” April 2025, https://www.nextgov.com/policy/2025/04/nsf-cancels-over-400-grants-covering-disinformation-deepfakes-and-stem-education/404731/. ↩

5. CyberScoop, “State Department’s disinformation office to close after funding nixed in NDAA,” December 2024, https://cyberscoop.com/state-departments-disinformation-office-to-close-after-funding-nixed-in-ndaa/. Washington Post, “Rubio shuts State Dept. foreign disinformation office, citing censorship,” April 16, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/16/rubio-foreign-disinformation-office-censorship/. Congress.gov, CRS report IN12475, “Termination of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center,” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12475. ↩

6. Free Press, “CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance,” December 2025, https://www.freepress.net/attack-on-free-speech. Poynter, “President Trump said he ‘brought back free speech.’ His first 100 days tell a different story,” April 2025, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2025/president-trump-freedom-speech/. NPR, “President Trump said he brought back free speech. Some of his actions contradict that,” March 6, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/06/nx-s1-5317739/president-trump-said-he-brought-back-free-speech-some-of-his-actions-contradict-that. ↩

7. White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Addresses Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship,” April 9, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-addresses-risks-from-chris-krebs-and-government-censorship/. CNBC, “Former cybersecurity agency chief Chris Krebs leaves SentinelOne after Trump targets him in executive order,” April 16, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/16/former-cisa-chief-krebs-leaves-sentinelone-after-trump-exec-order.html. CyberScoop, “Trump signs order stripping Chris Krebs of security clearance,” April 2025, https://cyberscoop.com/trump-chris-krebs-executive-order-2020-election/. ↩

8. PolitiFact, “How free speech fared in 100 days under President Trump,” April 29, 2025, https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/apr/29/donald-trump-free-speech-First-Amendment-100-days/. The Conversation, “Trump’s aggressive actions against free speech speak a lot louder than his words defending it,” April 2025, https://theconversation.com/trumps-aggressive-actions-against-free-speech-speak-a-lot-louder-than-his-words-defending-it-252706. NPR, “Justice Department revokes Biden-era protections for reporters in leak investigations,” April 25, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5377624/pam-bondi-reporters-subpoena-leaks. ↩

9. WLRN, “Midterm elections likely to see increased effects of misinformation, reduced security, experts say,” October 20, 2025, https://www.wlrn.org/government-politics/2025-10-20/midterm-elections-likely-to-see-increased-effects-of-misinformation-reduced-security-experts-say. Brennan Center for Justice, “How the Federal Government Is Undermining Election Security,” 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-federal-government-undermining-election-security. Defense One, “Shuttering of State office leaves US largely defenseless against foreign influence warfare,” April 2025, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/04/shuttering-state-office-leaves-us-largely-defenseless-against-foreign-influence-warfare-officials-say/404670/. ↩

10. NPR, “Meta to end fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram,” January 7, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5251151/meta-fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-trump. CNBC, “Meta scraps fact-checking, brings back political content in latest Trump-friendly move,” January 7, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/07/meta-eliminates-third-party-fact-checking-moves-to-community-notes.html. ↩