Trump's 'Free Speech' Presidency Racked Up 200 Censorship Attempts In Its First Year

[ancianita]

"... Nora Benavidez at Free Press (not the Bari Weiss publication, but the civil society group that has been around for years) has done the tedious but essential work of actually counting the censorship attempts from the Trump administration over the administration’s first year.

Remember all those years of Republicans insisting that when private platforms made moderation decisions they didn’t like, it was “censorship,” but when the government did it, that was just fine? Yeah. We’re living in that world now.
Benavidez makes an important point about how this all works together:

What is important to recognize is that these efforts work in concert in their frequency and their volume: Even the most egregious cases seem to quickly fade from public consciousness, and in that way, they’re clearly meant to overwhelm us and make us think twice about exercising our rights.

This is the Bannon “flood the zone” strategy applied to constitutional rights. You can’t focus on any single outrage because there are fifteen new ones by the time you finish reading about it. Each individual act of censorship might spark a news cycle, but two hundred of them? ...

... this is the same guy whose supporters spent years screaming that the Biden administration was engaged in unprecedented censorship because some officials sent some angry emails to social media companies—emails that, as we’ve covered extensively, the companies routinely ignored. That was the constitutional crisis that required Elon Musk to buy Twitter and “free the bird.”

But actual government coercion? Actual arrests? Actual lawsuits forcing private companies to change their speech policies? Actual bans on journalists? That’s apparently just “making America great again.”
Benavidez closes with a warning that shouldn’t need stating but apparently does:

But constitutional rights and democratic norms don’t disappear all at once; they erode slowly. The next three years will require a vigilant defense of free speech and open debate.

She’s right. And part of that vigilance means not letting the “free speech” crowd get away with pretending that the guy actively engaged in government censorship at scale is somehow its greatest defender.

Two hundred times. In one year. And we’re just getting started on year two."

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/16/trumps-free-speech-presidency-racked-up-200-censorship-attempts-in-its-first-year/

Note: It is Techdirt policy to give its posts away for free. Take a closer look at the lists at the OP link.

[malaise]

1. Important

Get thee to the greatest page

[SunSeeker]

2. 200 is a ridiculous undercount. nt

[ancianita]

3. Probably, but it's a lot and it's official.

The rest can stand as verbal disagreement about how reality works.