On November 9, 2024, Elon Musk recirculated a video link on X from the official Trump Campaign website originally published in December 2022. In it, Donald Trump laid out a five-point plan to address censorship and protect free speech. Mr. Musk has railed on this issue throughout the campaign season. Now President-Elect Trump takes office in January and to the extent that Mr. Musk has sway or influence over policy on this issue, Mr. Trump must take these campaign promises seriously.
YES!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2024
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Since 2020, much of the debate surrounding “misinformation” and “disinformation” has centered around public opinions being shared by critics of government policy surrounding the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This gave rise to significant public-private partnerships to combat “misinformation” which even proponents would argue reduced public confidence. Putting public health aside, it is beyond mere speculation that this strategy increased the system of censorship on popular internet platforms and expanded well beyond vaccine mandates and vaccine efficacy.
In May of 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Sotomayor in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo that the State of New York violated the NRA’s First Amendment rights by attempting to force insurers and financial institutions into no longer doing business with or providing services to the NRA. Sotomayor reasoned that “[a]t the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.” That case clearly demonstrated a government actor using its regulatory authority, not to aggressively address “misinformation,” but to suppress a point of view on a political topic that the party in power disagreed with.
Firearm-related content across the internet has generally faced overt increased censorship. In June of 2024, YouTube updated its firearms content policies and swept up far more than the “public safety” goals it claimed to be addressing, forcing several successful channels to abandon the platform altogether. But general gun content aside, over the last year or so we have seen a steady increased level of censorship of Second Amendment-related content that is purely political and viewpoint in nature.
I am one of the directors of the New Jersey Firearm Owners Syndicate, a nonprofit recently set up to conduct Second Amendment advocacy and to fund impact litigation to challenge New Jersey’s legislative regime regulating the right to keep and bear arms. As many in the state know, Syndicate started as a Facebook group managed principally by Mark Cheeseman, a prominent grassroots activist in New Jersey and the named plaintiff on numerous cases challenging a vast array of gun laws over the past decade.
I am myself an admin and frequent contributor on the Syndicate Facebook group where I have frequently provided updates on the various legal cases underway in New Jersey. In June of 2024, I posted an update regarding a letter filing in the consolidated ANJRPC v. Platkin and Cheeseman v. Platkin cases challenging New Jersey’s “assault weapon” and “large capacity magazine” bans. That post which contained only a copy of the letter filed by ANJRPC was removed by Facebook for violating their community standards on “dangerous organizations and individuals.” I attempted numerous times to challenge that determination and was unable to reach a live person at Meta (Facebook’s parent company) with the entire process hidden behind Facebook’s auto-moderation algorithm.
My experience was not unique. But then on October 1, at the start of the heart of the election season, member engagement rates across the entire Facebook group dropped by over 50% and then stayed at that reduced rate for the remainder of the season and through election day.
No group strikes occurred in that window, just unexplained throttling during a period of time when posts on the group page were more political in nature.
On the day after the election, Syndicate member Fernando Colon posted a simple one-sentence comment in response to a post about the likely legislative outcomes of the election. He wrote, “Bring back H.R. 38!!” H.R. 38 was re-introduced in the last federal Congressional session as the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act by Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina and gathered 203 co-sponsors in the House. This short statement also apparently violated Facebook’s Community Standards “on dangerous organizations and individuals.”
Colon, a U.S. Army combat veteran and former infantryman is an FFL, operates three gun shops in New Jersey and Puerto Rico, and runs a training company. When asked if he had experienced censorship on Facebook in the past he said, “Yes! On my personal stuff all the time!” According to Colon, Facebook suspended his business page for almost a year for posting training videos and pictures of his students.
These are just a handful of examples but if providing a filing update on a New Jersey Federal District Court case or voicing an opinion on a Congressional bill currently on the floor in Washington D.C. violates Facebook’s community standards, even in these limited instances along with unexplained throttling of a politically oriented Second Amendment Facebook group during the leadup to an election, is this not the type of “viewpoint” discrimination that Justice Sotomayor described as a unique threat “to a free and democratic society”?
In his five-point plan, President-Elect Trump called for a bill to revise 47 U.S.C. Sec. 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides indemnification from liability for internet and social media companies for user-generated content posted on their sites. Mr. Trump proposed that the indemnity that Sec. 230 provides be contingent upon those companies maintaining high standards of neutrality in content moderation.
Given the persistent level of censorship of Second Amendment and firearms-related content on major social media platforms and the clear and undeniable examples of at least state-level agencies specifically targeting Second Amendment advocacy groups like the NRA, we hope that at least some of the proposals Mr. Trump made during his campaign receive focused attention as soon into his new administration as possible.
