“The censorship and advertising boycott cartel must end now!” Elon Musk, the owner of X, whom Trump has appointed to cut the federal budget, posted on his site last month.
In Europe, social media companies face the opposite problem. There, regulators accuse the platforms of being too lax about the information they host, including allowing posts that stoked political violence in Britain and spread hate in Germany and France.
Trump’s return to the White House is expected to widen the speech divide that has long existed between the United States and Europe, setting up parallel regulatory systems that tech policy experts say could influence elections, public health and public discourse. That’s putting social media companies in the middle of a global tug of war over how to police content on their sites.
“What you are seeing is conflicting laws emerging from the world’s democracies, and consumers in the end suffer,” said Kate Klonick, an associate professor of property and internet law at St. John’s University School of Law. The result could be a fractured internet experience where people see different content based on the laws where they live, she said.
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Free speech is core to making America great, said Morgan Ackley, a spokesperson for Trump. “President Trump is committed to protecting this right for all Americans,” she added. The cross-Atlantic regulatory clash stems from distinctly different global views on free speech. The United States, which has the First Amendment, also passed a law in 1996, known as Section 230, that shields companies from liability for content posted online — meaning it is largely up to social media sites to decide what to remove.
In Europe, unfettered free speech is considered a potential threat to democracy. Historical moments like the rise of Nazism inform policy, and freedom of expression is balanced against the potential harm to the public, particularly when it comes to religious or racial minority groups.
This summer, the British government imprisoned people for social media posts encouraging violence during riots intensified by misinformation about the murder of three young girls. German authorities raid people’s homes over allegations of antisemitism, insults and other harmful social media behavior. France arrested Telegram‘s CEO, Pavel Durov, for his failure to rein in illicit content on the messaging app.
In the European Union, the Digital Services Act, passed in 2022, requires companies to quickly remove illicit content or face fines of up to 6% of their total revenue. Britain passed a similar law last year to regulate online speech, particularly content seen as harming children or encouraging terrorism.
In the United States, speech is restricted only when it comes to imminent threats, like falsely shouting that there is a fire in a theater, said Daniel Holznagel, a German appellate judge in Berlin who helped draft that country’s online hate speech law. “In Europe, it’s not only a fire-in-a-theater standard, but also hate speech, incitement to hatred and more.”
Trump, who was temporarily barred from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for what the companies said was an attempt to stoke violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, campaigned in part on promises to obliterate legal protections for social media sites and to restore free speech online.
Now Trump’s potential appointees have rallied to that message.
Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the FCC who would be promoted to lead it, said he would broaden the agency’s mandate, which is mainly to regulate phone and internet service providers and broadcast media. Carr was the author of a chapter on the FCC in the conservative Project 2025 planning document, in which he argued that the agency should also regulate the largest tech companies, such as Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft.
He also plans to weaken liability protections for online platforms under Section 230, exposing the companies to more lawsuits for choices they make on moderation.
“Combating tech censorship is going to be one of the top priorities for me,” Carr said in an interview with Fox News after he was selected.
Andrew Ferguson, who would likewise be promoted from a Republican position on the FTC to become the agency’s chair, said in a pitch to Trump at Mar-a-Lago that he would use antitrust law as a cudgel to go after the biggest platforms that stifle speech. He has argued that advertisers that left X could be the target of antitrust enforcement for potentially working together in ways that violated anti-collusion law.
“Concerted refusals to deal — also known as group boycotts — are illegal,” Ferguson said in a statement.
Carr and Ferguson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Some tech policy experts say Carr and Ferguson would face steep challenges in their legal interpretations. They may need congressional approvals in some instances to expand their agencies’ mandates. The tech industry will also fight new regulations that control their speech policies.
But tech policy experts said the threats of action could be enough to deter social media sites from heavily moderating content.
“They can try to bring lawsuits against the companies, but this is more about jawboning, or threatening lawsuits, investigations and generally making things complicated and expensive for the companies,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Some social media companies have already expressed a shift in attitude toward content moderation to better fit the new U.S. political climate.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, admitted to Congress in August that the Biden administration had pressured his company to remove COVID-related content that raised doubt about the virus and vaccines.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee chair, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who has investigated censorship on social media. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
The company perhaps most illustrative of the widening free speech divide is X. Musk bought the platform, which was known as Twitter, in 2022, vowing to make it a free speech haven and restoring thousands of previously banned accounts.
The European Union is investigating X for violating the Digital Services Act and a failure to safeguard the platform against illicit content and disinformation. “The DSA is misinformation!” Musk said in a post in July.
Chi Onwurah, a member of the British Parliament, is leading an investigation into the role of social media in the riots in Britain this year. “We talk about online harms, but that was incredibly real-world physical harm,” Onwurah said.
