President-Elect Donald Trump recently named Brendan Carr as his choice for FCC chairman. Carr has been vocal about the role the FCC will play in the upcoming administration, and in particular he accused “big tech” of running a “censorship cartel”.
In a formal letter to Big Tech CEOs at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, Carr accused the companies of contributing to censorship via their fact-checking and labeling of disinformation, in particular their use of the NewsGuard service.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel.
The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with “fact checking” groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.
The censorship cartel must be dismantled. pic.twitter.com/Xf0sEYOUfv
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) November 15, 2024
NewsGuard is ostensibly meant to provide “transparent” fact-checking that is meant to help users identify reliable information online. Carr accuses NewsGuard of having a partisan bias and draws attention to the fact that the company has allegedly rated CCP propaganda outlets as reliable in the past.
Perhaps most importantly, Carr expressed a desire to peel back protections from Section 230 of the Communications Act. Section 230 famously protects social media platforms from liability for what its users post and is one of the foundations of how such sites operate. Section 230 states:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Without Section 230, websites could be held liable for illegal content hosted on their site, even if the site moderates said content “in good faith”. It’s this good faith qualifier that Carr emphasizes, claiming that sites who perform moderation on what he considers to be valid political speech shouldn’t be covered by Section 230.
Carr is largely known for being one of the authors behind Project 2025 , in particular covering matters regarding the FCC.
