Nearly two years ago, President-elect Donald Trump taped a video outlining his plan to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” and “reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans.” But ironically, due to Big Tech censorship, many Americans never saw the video—until now.
The video, initially published on Dec. 15, 2022, is making its rounds on X and showing Trump’s commitment to restoring freedom of speech. “If we don’t have free speech, we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one,” he said. Trump understood this firsthand as nearly every platform had banned or suspended his accounts, including YouTube and Facebook where this video likely would have thrived.
As MRC reported and recorded in our exclusive CensorTrack database, Trump was silenced across nearly every major social media platform following the 2020 election, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify and Stripe. YouTube even repeatedly removed interviews with Trump in 2021, before he announced his third presidential run. This ongoing censorship left very few options for him to post online, and he ultimately chose to post his video on Rumble and his own platform Truth Social.
Entrepreneur and software engineer Marc Andreessen pointed out that the mass censorship is likely the reason why Trump’s free speech policy agenda is just now going viral. “President Trump was banned from YouTube Jan '21 to March '23. He was therefore forced to post new policy videos to Rumble [s]uch as this one, which went viral today but is from Dec '22,” he wrote in an X post on Saturday. “You didn't see his video about censorship because he was censored.”
Trump’s video responded to the vast censorship regime that had begun to unravel in 2022 after the Media Research Center, X owner Elon Musk and The Twitter Files journalists ripped back the curtain that had previously protected the deep state censorship cartel.
The Department of Homeland Security set the stage for the free speech movement to expose Big Tech government collusion. On Feb. 7, 2022, DHS released a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin and claimed that one of the “key factors” of a “heightened” terrorism threat included what it called “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information,” including “regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.”
Two days later, MRC Free Speech America revealed the extent to which Big Tech had already been annihilating content related to one of the DHS’s “terrorism” concerns over the previous two years. Utilizing MRC’s exclusive CensorTrack database, researchers found that Big Tech had censored users’ accounts and posts related to COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines no fewer than 808 times.
MRC would go on to expose how Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit censored Americans who criticized the Biden-Harris administration both during the 2020 campaign and after they took the White House. Big Tech silenced these critics a combined 646 times per CensorTrack.
In May, the DHS also briefly established the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) led by Nina “Mary Poppins” Jankowicz. The move garnered severe backlash from free-speech advocates, including Musk, who at the time was only considering buying Twitter. But the DHS soon paused, and by August terminated, the DGB after MRC exposed that a couple of its members had ties to leftist billionaire George Soros.
MRC also uncovered that Google had buried the websites of Republican senate candidates running in the most contested races of the 2022 midterm elections. In 10 of the 12 races (83%) that MRC researchers examined, the Republican candidates’ campaign websites appeared far lower than those of their Democratic opponents’. In some cases, the Republicans’ websites did not appear at all on the first page of Google’s search results. The search engine similarly buried the websites of 10 Big Tech critics running for Congress.
But the search giant did not stop there. On Dec. 12, just three days before Trump released his video outlining his pro-free speech agenda, MRC showed that in a swing precinct, Google favored the campaign website of Raphael Warnock, a Democrat running for the Georgia Senate run-off, to that of Republican candidate Herschel Walker.
That same day independent journalist Bari Weiss released Twitter Files Part Five titled “THE REMOVAL OF TRUMP FROM TWITTER,” which gave insight into the internal conversations and justifications Twitter employees gave for silencing Trump, the then sitting president of the United States. Musk finalized his acquisition of Twitter a month and a half prior to Weiss’s bombshell reporting on Twitter. His purchase of the anti-free speech platform allowed journalists to release over two dozen reports on uncovering Twitter’s scandalous relationship with the U.S. government.
Although Trump made the video in 2022, everything we have learned since then has only clarified the urgent need for an aggressive pro-free speech agenda. MRC, The Twitter Files journalists and the House Judiciary Committee have released dozens of reports exposing Big Tech election interference and its collusion with the government to censor Americans.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
