Many legal and cultural battles have been fought to protect freedom of speech in recent years. Now, a question is emerging: is President Donald Trump’s administration doing enough to secure this constitutional principle after he leaves office?
On January 20, Trump’s first day back in office, the President issued an Executive Order titled “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP.”
The order denounced the previous administration for “trampling” on free speech rights and “exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
Additionally, the order set forth the administration’s policy to secure the right to free speech, end censorship of protected free speech, investigate federal government activities inconsistent with this policy, and take appropriate remedial action.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly announced that he regretted not resisting pressure from federal agencies to censor pandemic-era speech. In 2022, Elon Musk implemented a more open speech policy after purchasing the social media platform Twitter, now known as X.
Although the degree to which federal agencies are complying with Trump’s barely one-month-old directive remains to be seen, the order does not have the permanence of law, meaning the next administration can potentially reverse it.
First Amendment organizations, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, denounced the Biden-era federal TikTok ban, which was effectively reversed on Trump’s first day in office. However, the ban was not legislatively repealed, and the Supreme Court has affirmed its constitutionality. It is unclear what the future of the Chinese-owned social media platform will be, although sale negotiations that could potentially allow TikTok to circumvent the ban are reported to be underway.
Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff spoke to the Texoma Patriots on February 26 to raise alarm bells about how free speech was lost in Europe and how it can be saved in the United States. The Austrian-born counter-jihad activist was one of the first internationally recognized figures to be convicted under Europe’s latest wave of anti-speech legislative and law enforcement actions in 2011. Sabaditsch-Wolff was fined by the Vienna Regional Criminal Court for “disparaging religious doctrines” after she asked an audience at a conference what Westerners would call Islam’s prophet Muhamed for the purported consummation of his marriage to a 9-year-old.
Sabaditsch-Wolff unsuccessfully appealed her case to the European Court of Human Rights, which held her speech was not protected and denied any reconsideration of the matter.
“I lost not just a court case but the comforting illusion that Western democracies support free speech,” she said, adding, “Your freedom can be revoked.”
She listed “algorithmic blacklists” on social media platforms, bank and payment processor deplatforming, and media campaigns as three tools she sees at use in Europe and the United States to “chip away” at free speech. She also urged the Texoma Patriots to resist any form of Chinese-style social credit system.
Sabaditsch-Wolff noted that the risks to people who freely express their ideas are substantial, as many are afraid of incurring legal fees, suffering social ostracism, and/or losing their jobs.
She pointed to the West, where many of these forces are at play, and said that Europe was how “societies sleepwalk into tyranny.”
Trump has highlighted some of the same issues. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the 47th President called out Bank of America’s President Brian Moynihan because the bank does not “take conservative business.”
A spokesman for the financial institution reportedly said that Bank of America welcomes conservative business. However, the company was sued by the attorney general of Virginia in 2024 for canceling conservatives’ accounts.
Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota has reintroduced the Fair Access to Banking Act, which would protect legal industries from debanking, according to a press release from the senator’s office. The proposed law was co-sponsored by several Republican senators, including Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. So far, the bill has not advanced in the Republican-controlled Senate.
During his first term in office, Trump issued a final rule that would have achieved similar ends as the bill. However, the rule was paused and never took effect after the Biden administration took power. In his second term, Trump issued a similar order aimed at “protecting and promoting fair and open access to banking services for all law-abiding individual citizens and private-sector entities alike.”
Trump’s 2024 campaign website read, “The fight for Free Speech is a matter of victory or death for America — and for the survival of Western Civilization itself. When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. … By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.”
Plans to secure First Amendment principles have not appeared to be at the top of the President’s legislative agenda. The Dallas Express asked the White House if this would change but did not receive a response by publication time.
Sabaditsch-Wolff concluded her remarks with these words: “Democracy is not self-executing. The moment you surrender, you’ve given up a piece of your freedom.”