For months, mainstream conservatives and far-right personalities have complained about an unfair, illegal bias in Big Tech. President Trump has openly sympathized with their concerns, even raising some of his own. But now he wants to do something about it.
According to three White House sources, Trump is considering an executive order that would address alleged anti-conservative bias. The order is only at its draft stage and none of the sources would describe its contents, Politico reported. But we don’t need to know what’s in it to understand that using the executive branch to force anti-conservative companies into submission is not conservative at all.
It should come as no surprise that Trump wants to take the fight to Silicon Valley. He depends on social media just as much as any of us, using Twitter to directly share his thoughts, communicate with his supporters, and insult his opponents. All Trump asks for in return is “fairness.”
“If the Internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,” one White House official told Politico. “But look, we also think that social media plays a vital role. They have a vital role and an increasing responsibility to the culture that has helped make them so profitable and so prominent.”
Trump’s Twitter presidency has created a new kind of political dependence on the immediate access to information social media provides. Concerns that this access could be taken away because of a user’s political preferences are understandable, but baseless. Twitter, Facebook, and others are not removing vast swarms of conservative accounts without reason — for now, at least.
Social media companies do have a responsibility to maintain First Amendment-based moderation standards. As it stands, Big Tech’s standards for what does and does not constitute an account suspension are unclear, impractical, and unequally enforced. Clearly, something isn’t working.
But it is not the president’s job to re-write Big Tech’s rules. The Constitution draws a succinct sphere in which the executive branch can act, and jumping outside that sphere to meddle in the affairs of private companies would be an egregious abuse of power.
Let’s say Trump goes through with this. What kind of rules would his executive order impose? Would they prohibit “disproportionate” restriction or promotion, as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley attempts to do in a bill he recently proposed? This is not a path conservatives want to take. What happens when President Kamala Harris gets to re-write those rules and decide what kind of political information or viewpoint is acceptable?
The purpose of limiting the scope of government, particularly the president’s scope, is to prevent future abuses from occurring. Sure, Trump could stack the odds in conservatism’s favor right now, but he won’t be president forever. The pendulum of power will inevitably return to the other side, and conservatives will be sorry they cried censorship when they did.
