(Credit: tylim/Getty Images)
The Federal Trade Commission has a new invitation to American opinion-havers: Show us where the tech platforms hurt you.
The FTC on Thursday announced an investigation into what it calls “tech censorship,” which it describes as “how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”
The announcement from FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson, newly promoted to that post by President Trump, calls that “not just un-American” but “potentially illegal.”
The Supreme Court ruled otherwise about the illegality part last summer when it held that Trump and Biden administration officials hectoring social platforms to enforce their own rules against vaccine or election disinformation did not amount to government censorship without direct orders or threats by those officials.
But the FTC’s description of how online forums “can employ confusing or unpredictable internal procedures that cut users off” does check out.
Content moderation is never easy but also unavoidable. Without it, you risk having online forums overrun with spam, scams, and spittle-flecked vitriol, and it’s easy to make mistakes–especially when content-moderation systems must run automatically and at massive scale.
The FTC's announcement doesn’t mention what may be the most infamous such case: When Twitter and Facebook blocked shares of a 2020 New York Post story about the contents of a laptop used by Hunter Biden, a move the platforms did after being warned that this news fit into the pattern of past Russian hack-and-leak influence operations.
Those platforms almost immediately recanted those moves, which in Twitter’s case had included temporarily locking the Post’s account. But by then the laptop story and its suppression had become a talking point that lingers in Republican circles today. See, for instance, Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr vowing his own crackdown on alleged tech censorship. And Trump's recent executive order on "restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship."
(Deliberate or accidental suppression of content so often leads to more people knowing about it that there’s a phrase for it: the "Streisand Effect." Techdirt publisher Mike Masnick coined that in 2005 when reflecting on how a lawsuit by Barbra Streisand seeking the takedown of an aerial photograph of her beach house resulted in far more people checking out the picture.)
Last April, Meta’s content-moderation machinery went even more awry when it shut down not only shares of an opinion piece in the Kansas Reflector criticizing its conduct but also disabled that nonprofit newsroom’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts. Meta later blamed that on a phishing filter gone haywire.
More recently, however, X has taken the lead in removing content for no obvious reason. In 2022, owner Elon Musk declared himself “a free speech absolutist.” However, within weeks of his purchase of then-Twitter, the platform banned an account tracking the flights of Musk’s private jet, suspended the accounts of multiple journalists covering Musk before reinstating them, and briefly blocked links to competing social networks.
Last summer, X removed posts sharing a story about a leaked dossier of then vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. This week, X users have found themselves unable to share links to their accounts on the secure-messaging app Signal–a tool that many government employees fired by Musk’s “DOGE” government-disruption project have used to talk to journalists.
The FTC announcement invites all of those people and others who feel they have been wronged by tech-platform content decisions to submit a comment on its site by May 21. That input will be posted later to the government’s regulations.gov site. To submit a private report of social-media-moderation misconduct, visit ReportFraud.ftc.gov and select “Report Now.”