Donald Trump’s pardoning of 1,500 people and their accomplices for the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January, 2021 – with acusations that his own rhetoric contributed to the riot widespread – has put the US ideal of free speech back at the top of the agenda among US observers and legal experts.
In the executive order “Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship" – one of the 78 Trump signed on the day of his second inauguration on 20 January – he writes that the previous administration had “trampled free speech rights”.
Trump vows to act with 'historic speed and strength' via executive orders
He accuses Biden's administration of "censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms" by pressuring social media companies to "moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve".
The order goes on to attack Biden's attempts to fight disinformation, saying these were a ploy to advance "the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate" and declares: "Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society."
'Enemies of the people'
Trump too has previously been accused of attempting to silence those who don't agree with him. In 2022 he sued Hillary Clinton, whom he had beaten to the presidency in 2016, over her remarks about his campaign's alleged links to Russia.
He has also called journalists the "enemy of the people" and launched defamation cases against several large US media outlets, including ABC News, CBS, CNN and publisher Simon & Schuster.
"Here in the United States, we don't see the government's job as just policing what is misinformation or disinformation," said David Keating, president of the non-profit organisation, the Institute for Free Speech, whose stated mission is to "promote and defend the First Amendment rights" and which represents plaintiffs in free speech cases.
"The remedy here is more speech, not censorship," said Keating.
Trump targets opponents, faces criticism from cathedral pulpit
Meta changes
In a move seemingly aligned with Trump's views on "censorship" of online platforms, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg last week announced that his company will stop using a third-party fact-checking programme.
Instead, like Elon Musk's social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Meta will now move to a "Community Notes programme" whereby users "decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context".
On X, any user who has had a profile on the platform for longer than six months and has an active phone number, and has not previously violated the site's behavioural code, can become a "fact checker", while maintaining anonymity.
Keating, who said he participated in this programme on X, said: "It tries to get people with different political points of view to agree on what an actual fact check should look like, and most of the ones that I've seen pop up on the platform are actually quite good."
French NGOs to quit social media platform X following Trump inauguration
He also stressed that fact checking is something that's protected under the First Amendment, but what it does not protect, he added, is incitement to violence.
"This doesn't mean that you can't call for the overthrow of the government even by violent means – as just a general rule, that's actually OK," he explained.
"But if you were, say, before a crowd, and the crowd is getting angry and you're riling the crowd up and then you're giving the crowd specific instructions – 'here's what we're going to do to teach the people in power lesson, we're going to go and burn down that building, and here's how we're going to do it, and let's go' – that's... incitement to violence, and that's a violation of the law."
Reacting to Trump's pardoning of the Capitol rioters, US Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a statement on 21 January.
It said that "Trump-inspired thugs attacked and trashed the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election," and called the pardon "a national embarrassment".
