Freedom of expression is a big leap backwards

In early December, Joshua Aaron, the developer behind the ICEBlock app — designed to allow people to alert others about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — filed a lawsuit against Federal lawsuit Claiming that his First Amendment rights had been violated. The Justice Department urged Apple to remove the Aaron app from its App Store, which the lawsuit called unconstitutional. Apple has complied, in the process, setting its own precedent for suppressing anti-ICE speech.

The year 2025 may mark the biggest leap backwards for American freedom of expression in generations. The Trump administration’s war on immigrants and civil liberties has led to this Deportation attempt Organizers And researchers On political discourse, Arming the FCC To crack down on unfavorable radio programmes, and He filed several frivolous lawsuits Against journalists who covered Trump, many of whom reached settlements that closely resembled extortion rackets.

Immigration restrictions, strict regulations, civil suits, and bad faith prosecutions – all are long-standing tools for suppressing freedom of expression and criticism. But the administration has also moved to control the gatekeepers of private speech. with Formalize the deal To sell TikTok to a consortium that includes Ellison’s Oracle, we will end 2025 with full or partial control of every major social media platform by Trump-friendly American billionaires, the same year in which, for the first time, most people in the country They reported that they get their news from social media. Consolidating control over social media and its widespread influence gives management an extremely powerful and newer tool, one that ironically began as an attempt to preserve and protect online discourse: content moderation.

The Trump administration had suggested, without evidence, that ICEBlock was putting its customers at risk. This is the first lawsuit of its kind after major tech companies banned his and similar tools. Including eyes upan application designed to archive and index footage of past ICE operations. For all of these takedowns, platforms like Apple and Google cited supposed violations of content policies, including, in particular, Remove the red dot and Ice remover By classifying ICE agents as a vulnerable group.

“I talked to a couple of veteran people in the trust and safety space who have done this kind of work inside platforms for years, and they were saying, ‘We can’t talk about Apple’s policy, but I’ve never seen a policy like this before, where the cops are a protected class,’” said Daphne Keller, an assistant general counsel at Google who is now director of platform regulation at Stanford’s Program in Law, Science, and Technology. “My reading of the situation is that they really needed to make that concession to the government for whatever reason — because of any pressure they were under or any benefit they thought they were going to get from making the concession — and they did.” “That, and then they had to find an excuse.”

The idea of ​​platform content moderation is as old as the relatively new social media and technology platforms themselves, but it is generally understood to balance freedom of expression with the need to protect vulnerable groups or populations. The inversion of this concept is the use of moderation to restrict speech to protect the actions of the state against Vulnerable Populations – This is a troubling and relatively new phenomenon here in the United States, although it is already becoming the modus operandi elsewhere.

one Carnegie Foundation paper Published last year, it focused on India and Thailand, detailing how governments in those countries used language, platforms’ content management infrastructure and community standards systems to restrict criticism and message direction. For example, India under Narendra Modi imposed “national security” restrictions imposed mostly on civil society, using a multi-pronged approach of legal, economic, and political pressure.

Sangeeta Mahapatra, a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and co-author of the study, stressed that while researchers are loathe to extrapolate findings too much into new contexts with their own complexities, it is clear that the US government was on the same path. “We’ve seen this game played so many times that there is now some sort of predictability,” she said. “The wolves are right at the door. You realize how this is an everyday phenomenon. It’s not an episodic thing, these kinds of intrusions into your life and the key role that the platform plays, not just as an enabler, but as a proactive enabler.”

Mahapatra stressed that while much of the public framing — and indeed the gloating of administration officials — was about the Department of Justice or Homeland Security forcing or demanding companies to shut down these apps, the pressure, at the time the decisions were made, was purely rhetorical, and these companies sometimes responded forcefully to the government’s strong-arming. A decade ago, Apple became famous He went on a legal and rhetorical attack To block requests by the FBI to create software to bypass iPhone security as the agency attempted to unlock a phone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter.

However, there is now what she calls the “co-production of digital authoritarianism” where the government does not have to do as much to expect a certain level of compliance. “When you see Apple proactively removing apps, it’s not something that started with Trump, it’s a pattern we’ve been observing for some time. We’ve seen it in South Asia in particular, India in particular, which is a very lucrative market.”

“There’s a narrative on the Republican side right now about them being free speech warriors and they’re really angry about the way the Biden administration is censoring online expression,” Keller noted. However, “politicians on both sides have always tried to persuade platforms to remove content, and it has always been to serve their interests or political preferences.” In that environment, it can be legitimately difficult to know what is ordinary speech and what crosses the First Amendment line.

But, as she noted, Trump et al. It wasn’t entirely accurate; Less than two weeks before he takes office again, Trump said Changes made by Trump-friendly Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to his platforms’ content policies were “most likely” a result of the incoming president’s threat to jail Zuckerberg. As the lawsuit against ICEBlock makes clear, not only did the administration rely on Apple to remove the app, but high-ranking officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Immigration Coordinator Tom Homan, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, continued to gloat about how they directly carried out the takedown.

The ability of ordinary people to be alerted to ICE sightings and then film and distribute the findings was important not only in a broad narrative sense, but for concrete practical applications such as forming the basis of judicial interventions. In mid-October, US District Judge Sarah Ellis ordered Customs and Border Protection agents under Trump henchman and Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino to take action. Follow use of force guidelines and wear body cameras After television footage and footage from bystanders showed violent clashes between agents and protesters. These were body worn cameras at the time The basis for the judge’s conclusion That Bovino and his agents were lying to her in their descriptions of their operations (including the discovery that the agents apparently used ChatGPT to write at least one use-of-force report).

With an administration that has proven itself ready, willing, and able to repeatedly lie to the public, the media, Congress, and the courts, the accounts and records produced and compiled by the community, reporters, and researchers appear to be the only reliable body of evidence about what federal agencies are actually doing on the ground — warrantless arrests, excessive force, and profiling. The presence of platforms willing to close off the paths for people to learn about, monitor, and archive footage of these operations poses a tangible risk to the public’s ability to know what is going on at all.

Mahapatra said she was working with local partners including journalists and civic organizations on “keeping the records, all the receipts, so that the digital trail and evidence is not lost, and there is some accountability mechanism… If you don’t document, the narrative becomes clearer and more durable and long-lasting.”

This federal pressure to destroy these tools can also be understood through the lens of an administration working to shut down a competitor in the narrative-building game. It is no secret that the Department of Homeland Security, under Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, sees itself not only as a law enforcement and security information-sharing center, but also as a propaganda tool for the administration’s anti-immigration political project. DHS has sent its own photographers to assist with the production Great video-like footage of its operationsruns Job Ads Trulish Which emphasizes its leaders’ preoccupation with “Western values,” and it has done so Spending more than $200 million on advertising campaignsincluding a company linked to Noem herself.

Keller pointed out Chicago’s now infamous night raid Heavily armed agents, some in helicopters, besieged a residential building in an operation used by the administration As fodder for a heavily produced video. “The idea is that this is a media war, about who can get the most compelling shots in their favour,” she said. “That’s what ICE was doing at that moment, and that’s what they were trying to prevent activists from doing by shutting down the apps, to the point where the apps became about bringing people together and getting video and documenting what was going on.”

Social media moderation and the bad-faith use of terms of service as weapons in speech wars is a little more abstract than detaining political organizers, even with how poorly the administration ultimately handled the matter, but it is arguably a more expansive and effective way to influence and control available discourse. Now that Trump and his team have gotten a taste of how easy it is to get companies to play, why don’t they continue to come up with this idea?

These platforms may have been acting out of expediency, but now that they have opened Pandora’s box, it is difficult to know what the administration might be seeking to achieve. If ICE employees are now a protected class under Apple’s rules, does this mean the company can enforce hate speech standards against these critical customers? If not, why not? “I expect they haven’t really thought about the implications of whether they would interpret the policy that way in the future,” Keller said.