A Big Tech policy expert is warning Republicans that tech CEOs, especially Mark Zuckerberg, cannot be trusted to implement lasting reforms without more oversight and drastic measures.
Rachel Bovard, the Conservative Partnership Institute’s VP of programs, joined the April 14 edition of War Room with host Steve Bannon. During the segment, she argued that antitrust reform is the long-term solution to online censorship. Bovard noted that while censorship may decline as tech CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg cozy up to the Trump administration, attitudes can change. “The central issue here is the massive control that they still have over swaths of speech and public life, and that can switch on a dime,” she cautioned, urging action to break up monopolies.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced reforms, including a revamped fact-checking program, but while he might be sincere right now, he could change policies again when Donald Trump leaves office, Bovard warned. “Right now is an attempt to pretend all of that never happened, to engage on this mea culpa tour and say, ‘you know we were wrong. …We're going to do all these things. We're going to promote Republicans at our company.’”
Bovard added, “If Republicans are ever out of power again, [Zuckerberg] can turn the switch again, and we're back to where we were.” Ultimately, “The locus of control, if it's maintained by anti-competitive intent, which I believe that it is, needs to be demolished so that we never have to live through this speech oligarchy, ever again,” Bovard emphasized.
The tech policy expert also reminded viewers how easily and effectively and Big Tech worked with the federal government to censor Americans. “[W]e saw over the last four years through the efforts of congressional oversight, we saw just how meaningful the government activities were when they were able to go to these companies and to knock on Mark Zuckerberg’s door and say, ‘by the way, you're going to see a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. That’s Russian disinformation,’” she said, referring to the federal government’s pressure campaign to get social media companies to censor speech.
MARK ZUCKERBERG ON TRIAL, FREE SPEECH IN JEOPARDY
— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) April 14, 2025
Zuckerberg has been caught with communications to and from the government suppressing free speech on Meta owned apps. "The massive control that they still have over swaths of public life." @rachelbovard pic.twitter.com/T65udpy55X
Zuckerberg even publicly admitted his company was pressured, particularly in relation to the 2020 election. Such pressure increased under the Biden administration, per the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit.
The control of free speech on a “massive scale” by a few platforms enabled election-altering censorship, Bovard argued. “We saw this in the Twitter Files, the constant, near constant communication between the FBI and the social media platforms. And with Facebook in particular, you saw almost [] daily communication, multiple times a day between the CDC and Facebook during the COVID pandemic, with the CDC flagging specific posts [and] specific users and saying you need to take them down.” Unfortunately, Facebook complied.
Tying it all together, Bovard explained how to prevent a repeat of this rampant censorship. “All the speech issues are downstream of this market power so that is why this trial is so important,” she said. “[Y]ou can't get to this censorship issue without first addressing how it happened, and how it happened is this economic monopoly over these platforms.”
Meta is currently in the middle of a trial following an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Furthermore, a Meta whistleblower testified to the Senate Judiciary last week that Zuckerberg and his fellow Meta executives tried to curry favor with Communist China.
