The United States federal government has invited public comment to better understand how technology platforms “deny or degrade” users’ access to services based on the content of the users’ speech or their affiliations, including activities that take place outside the platform. Below is our letter to the Federal Trade Commission stating our positions on technology platform censorship:

TO: Federal Trade Commission

FROM: liber-net

DATE: May 21, 2025

SUBJECT: Re: Request for Public Comment Regarding Technology Platform Censorship 

liber-net would like to provide the Federal Trade Commission information related to its inquiry in question 5(b) relating to government involvement in technology platform censorship.

About liber-net

liber-net is a digital civil liberties initiative working to re-establish free speech and civil liberties as the default standard for our networked age. We are an initiative concerned about corporate and government censorship and a civil society that has discreetly pushed for and developed speech controls under the guise of combating “mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM).” 

liber-net seeks to enable free speech, both offline and online and support technologies which facilitate both individual agency, collective endeavor, and the free exchange and circulation of ideas. We accomplish this through writing, research and publication, media interventions, campaigning, events and network building. Our recent research has uncovered the extent of federal funding and involvement of content moderation as well as developing policy proposals to reverse these actions. We published the former as a searchable database and the latter as a policy paper. We are pleased to share this work with the Federal Trade Commission as it seeks to understand how consumers have been harmed by technology platform policies. 

Introduction
It is increasingly clear that the U.S. federal government had developed a large-scale system to coordinate the suppression of its citizens’ First Amendment-protected speech. Evidence supporting this assertion comes from the Twitter Files, discovery evidence in the combined cases of Murthy v. Missouri and Kennedy v. Biden, and the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. This body of evidence has demonstrated the existence of a network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academic institutions, think tanks, and major technology companies often working directly with, or under pressure from the government to control flows of information and censor online content. This network is sometimes referred to as the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

On August 27, 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming that the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor First Amendment-protected speech relating to Covid and the Hunter Biden laptop story. In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg revealed that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid content, including humor and satire,” and expressed regret that Facebook complied by suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after receiving a warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding a “Russian disinformation campaign.” Beginning in January 2025, Meta moved to roll back some of their speech controls on the platform, including severing relationships with third-party fact-checkers; liber-net issued a statement welcoming these developments and suggesting further reforms.

In addition to direct FBI pressure, 50 former national security officials claimed the Hunter Biden story was a “Russian information operation” in an effort to discredit it. A host of major media outlets, NGOs, and fact-checkers repeated this assertion in lockstep. The story was quickly suppressed on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, potentially influencing the outcome of the Presidential election, which was mere weeks away. 

Federal officials engaged in similar behavior through the entirety of Covid. Multiple leaked documents revealed the government placing direct pressure on social media platforms to censor online speech, including seeding or supporting academic and NGO consortiums to act as proxies to hide this government pressure. Perhaps the best-known example is the Virality Project, an endeavor initiated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and led by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). This project pushed for the censorship of academics and individuals who disagreed with  policies of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), even advising major social media partners to label true stories of vaccine side effects as “misinformation.”

Unfortunately, these high-profile incidents are likely just a small fraction of instances where the U.S. government has put its thumb on the scales to influence content moderation decisions on private platforms. While government officials have claimed that they are merely using their own speech capacities to make policy, their pressure campaigns are implicitly backed by the threat of using broader regulatory or legislative powers to bring companies to heel if they do not comply.

Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, essential for holding governments accountable and fundamentally protecting and empowering vulnerable groups. Protections for individual speech and expression apply not only to views we agree with but also to those we strongly oppose. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in First Amendment cases that the “government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content,” and has explained that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” Indeed, as Justice Breyer noted, “it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth,” even when such truth can actually be established (United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 731–32) – to say nothing of cases when truth, in fact, cannot. 

Notably, the First Amendment specifies not only government prohibition of speech, but the mere abridging thereof. The writers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights deeply understood that the ability to freely speak, write, and publish is a foundational element of human nature and is therefore an inalienable right. The protections they enshrined in the First Amendment remain some of the strongest bulwarks against authoritarian censorship and tyranny ever devised.

The broad pattern of government overreach we have witnessed over recent years demonstrates a strong need to reinvigorate free speech protections across the United States. liber-net is pleased to share a series of ideas for how the federal government might achieve this goal, complimenting our recent research into digital free speech-related legislation at the State level.

Our Federal MDM Funding Database

liber-net has built a searchable database of nearly 900 awards issued by the U.S. federal government covering the topics of “mis-, dis-, or malinformation” (MDM) and other content moderation initiatives from 2012 to 2025. These awards have each been manually reviewed, with the intention of providing nuance and an alternative to the fishing-with-dynamite style of attempted administrative reforms.

Not everything in this database can be labeled a “censorship initiative.” Rather, the database tells the story of how the U.S. Federal Government became the lead player in developing the anti-disinformation field, skewing funding towards top-down, expert-driven, content moderation. Among the many problems with this approach is the assumed omnipotence of those doing the moderation, to say nothing of the weaponization of “countering-disinformation” to attack political opponents.

The database includes a wide range of awards: from projects that sought to actively remove (or scale systems for removing) content from the Internet or report the results to officials, to programs that sought to leverage machine learning to detect “deepfakes” with no obvious plans to tilt the political scales.

Our methodology involved reviewing over 1,100 grants indexed on public funding databases including usaspending.gov (the main database for tracking historical grant, loan, and contract data), grants.gov (which displays current opportunities), sam.gov (a website tracking registration records, which include contract award data), the Federal Audit Clearinghouse (a repository of standardized Single Audits from organizations receiving federal funds,) and a variety of agency-specific award databases such as nsf.gov/awardsearch/ (NSF-specific),