The pro-free speech Federal Trade Commission chair highlighted the harms that censorship poses to the “marketplace of ideas” and argued that antitrust reform is needed to check Big Tech.
FTC’s Andrew Ferguson spoke Thursday at the Stigler Center on the connection between free speech and antitrust reform. He pointed to a lack of competition among social media companies ultimately leading to censorship and preventing users from engaging in “the free exchange of ideas.” Ferguson explained that these practices “pose[] an identifiable harm to consumer welfare,” necessitating antitrust reform. While consumer welfare does not always “dovetail with the preservation of important constitutional values like the freedom of speech,” in this case, it does, and the “vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws can promote this important and constitutional value.”
Ferguson noted the fact that social media’s “concentrated” market with little competition fosters online censorship. "Increased concentration can negatively impact the marketplace of ideas because it facilitates a variety of censorious practices." He went on to say that these practices, no matter who or what pushes for them to be enacted, are harmful or “inimical to the free expression that makes our marketplace and ideas possible.”
The FTC chairman went on to stress the vital importance of Americans’ free speech. “[F]reedom of speech, which makes the marketplace of ideas possible, is a value deeply woven into the very fabric of our constitutional order and our society,” Ferguson stated. “If market concentration negatively impacts our marketplace of ideas, it is because it limits rather than expands the free exchange of ideas among the citizenry.”
.@AFergusonFTC slams Big Tech censorship
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) Apr 13, 2025
Ferguson further explained: “Every user of social media, from the low-brow meme makers to the self-anointed policers of misinformation, is invested in the preservation of free expression on social media, because users of social media prefer it as a form of free expression and as such, a facilitator of a marketplace of ideas.” The FTC chairman argued that undermining free speech is therefore “a deliberate abuse of a social media platform’s market power and a potential violation of our antitrust laws.”
He went on to address so-called “misinformation,” rebuking it outright. “I categorically dismiss elite and Democrat hysteria over misinformation altogether,” he said, adding that “highly concentrated social media space generates far more opportunities for elite and left-wing manipulation than it does for populist so-called misinformation.” He called this a “recipe for elite manipulation of the public under the guise of combating misinformation.”
Indeed, MRC’s researchers exposed some of this elite manipulation in a recent study exposing 57 censorship initiatives pushed by the Biden administration. MRC’s report uncovered Big Tech’s collusion with top-tier federal government officials and agencies to censor free speech with extreme leftist bias.
Free speech is under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech and government be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for alternative viewpoints. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
