Trump's Plan To Fight Censorship, Explained

What happened: Last week, former President Donald Trump released a video laying out a  plan to destroy the “censorship cartel.” The plan focuses on addressing the federal government's enablement of censorship and social media companies's ability to censor.

Federal agencies: Trump wants to make it illegal for federal agencies to collude with social media platforms to censor Americans, as has happened at Twitter and Facebook. He also wants to fire, investigate, and criminally prosecute every bureaucrat that has engaged in this process.

Cooling-off period: Trump's plan also called for a seven-year cooling-off period before federal officials can be employed by Big Tech platforms. Among the other major platforms, Twitter is notorious for hiring ex-intelligence officials from the FBI and CIA who have enabled government-influenced censorship on a mass scale.

Taxpayer funding: The censorship plan aims to make it illegal for taxpayer funds to be used for public fact-checking—the Biden administration tried to set up a Disinformation Governance Board to do just that. The plan also calls to ban taxpayer funding for universities and nonprofits that advocate for and enable censorship.

Section 230 provides social media platforms immunity in the moderation of the third-party content they host. Trump's plan involves only giving platforms immunity for moderating content under Section 230 if they “meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and nondiscrimination.”

Digital Bill of Rights: The former president called for the right to digital due process, requiring government officials to have a court order before taking down online content, instead of the current process where partisan FBI agents can informally request social media platforms to censor.