Vance says Big Tech still 'on notice' in clash over free speech

Stephanie Lai, Bloomberg News on Jan 26, 2025

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Vice President JD Vance said big tech companies remain “very much on notice” under the Trump administration to avoid content moderation that conservatives view as censorship.

“We believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” Vance said in an interview on CBS’s "Face the Nation" broadcast Sunday. “They can either respect Americans’ constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don’t, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them.”

Vance’s comments reflect a long-standing allegations by Trump and his supporters that tech companies and social-media platforms exhibit anti-conservative bias by seeking to moderate content.

On Jan. 20, the day of his inauguration to a second presidential term, Trump issued an executive order against “government censorship” that forbids federal employees or officers from interfering in constitutional free speech rights.

After leaving office in 2021, Trump complained that Alphabet Inc.’s Google suppresses good news about him and accused Meta Platforms Inc. of unfairly banning him from Facebook and Instagram in 2021.

Since he won reelection in November, tech CEOs have made pilgrimages to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and donated to his inaugural fund. Alongside Trump ally Elon Musk, inauguration attendees included Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Zuckerberg has sought to reposition Meta as more friendly to Trump after years of conflict. This month, the company moved to end third-party fact-checking on its platforms, a decision Trump hailed.

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said content moderation systems at the company had “gone too far” and were blocking free expression too often.

Trump clashed with X — then known as Twitter — in 2020 after it fact-checked posts from him, saying one had violated the platform’s rules over “glorifying violence” and others about mail-in voting it called “potentially misleading.”

Trump accused the company of censorship and threatened to shut it down before signing an executive order intended to limit social-media companies’ liability protections that asked agencies to take appropriate actions.

Platforms including Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump over posts seen as encouraging rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

After buying the Twitter platform, Musk lifted its ban on Trump in 2022. Meta reinstated Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in January 2023 after a two-year suspension.

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