US GOP Cites Big Tech Over Potential Censorship Of Conservatives

One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to protect free speech in the United States. The now-president argued that media and social media platforms censored conservative voices in favor of liberal ones. In a recent development, the US GOP subpoenas several big tech companies in search of more related evidence.

In August 2024, Mark Zuckerberg—CEO of Meta—surprised the tech industry by revealing that the Joe Biden administration pressured the company’s social media platforms to censor certain speech. The “silenced voices” pertained to COVID vaccines. The measures primarily affected posts questioning topics such as the effectiveness of the vaccines or possible side effects. This led Zuckerberg, months later, to champion “freedom of expression” on his social media services.

The Republican Party believes that big tech companies could have taken similar measures against conservative voices to please those in the White House. Several social media platforms banned Donald Trump’s accounts at the time, for instance. This led Trump to found Truth Social, a platform that advocated for freedom of expression and where he could also keep in touch with his supporters. Conservatives have also complained that social media moderation algorithms allegedly suppressed right-wing speech more than others.

16 major big tech companies subpoenaed in investigation into potential censorship of conservatives

Now, Jim Jordan, the GOP Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has sent subpoenas to 16 big tech companies. The representative is asking for communications related to content moderation or suppression. He is also requiring inputs and outputs for AI models, training datasets, moderation algorithms, and everything potentially related. The request covers a five-year period (January 1, 2020 – January 20, 2025).

The list of companies cited includes Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI. The main goal of the investigation is to determine “how and to what extent the executive branch coerced or colluded with artificial intelligence (AI) companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech.” The representative included AI companies because this technology can be especially useful in discriminating political biases among speech.

The GOP had already launched its own investigation on the topic. In December, they released a report with examples of the Biden administration “pressuring private companies to ‘advance equity,’ stop ‘algorithmic discrimination,’ and ‘mitigate the production of harmful and biased outputs.’” The latest move is a new step in this investigation.