A shocking number of current and former U.S. presidential nominees have pushed for online censorship. Their comments include calling for the criminalization of speech, banning opposition speech in the name of mis-, dis- or mal-information, and weaponizing the federal government to achieve these goals.
A new MRC Free Speech America analysis lays out for the record astonishing examples of U.S. presidential nominees undermining free speech rights and the First Amendment by pushing online censorship. Since the 2020 election cycle, seven of the most recent 10 presidential nominees have called for censorship and/or government regulation of political speech.
The analysis examined statements from presidential candidates of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The findings—from Al Gore to Kamala Harris on the Democratic side, and from George W. Bush to Donald Trump on the Republican side—highlight a stark divide between the two parties concerning free speech, censorship and Big Tech companies.
One Republican, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, and all six Democrats—including former Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of State John Kerry, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—have voiced support for censorship and against the American principles of free speech online. One Republican, former President Donald Trump, has taken steps to protect free speech rights. The remaining two Republicans, former President Bush and former Arizona Sen. John McCain (deceased) are not on record regarding censorship of online speech since the 2020 election cycle.
Kamala Harris, 2024 Democratic Nominee for President
Harris has forecasted her administration's stance on free speech if she were elected president in 2024. In addition to overseeing the most aggressive governmental censorship effort in our nation’s history, she made remarks in 2019 that signaled her intent to exert executive authority to censor her opponents in ways that could reach unprecedented levels.
“They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of, of, of [sic] oversight or regulation, and that has to stop,” Harris claimed of social media companies during a 2019 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. As vice president, Harris colluded and coerced Big Tech platforms to do exactly as she had previously demanded.
MRC research has now uncovered 10 departments and six additional federal agencies utilizing their power and resources to censor Americans who oppose the Biden-Harris administration. Multiple lawsuits and judicial findings have concluded that Harris and Biden have, in fact, used the government to unconstitutionally silence and censor speech in direct violation of First Amendment protections.
In another blatant attempt to silence her adversaries before becoming vice president, Harris repeatedly called for Trump to be banned from Twitter entirely. In fact, she pushed to censor Trump five times—and it worked.
“I, frankly, think that based on [Trump’s tweets] and all we’ve seen him do before, including attacking members of Congress, that he, frankly, his Twitter account should be suspended,” Harris, then a U.S. senator, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2019. She reiterated that call to action later that evening, tweeting, “Look let's be honest, @realDonaldTrump 's Twitter account should be suspended.”
As if that weren’t enough, Harris even sent a letter directly to then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “I believe the President’s recent tweets rise to the level that Twitter should consider suspending his account,” she lamented. “Others have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior. And when this kind of abuse is being spewed from the most powerful office in the United States, the stakes are too high to do nothing.”
Donald Trump, 2016, 2020 and 2024 Republican Nominee for President
Trump has become the target of Big Tech censorship as he attempted to stop the assault against free speech by the same social media companies that ultimately censored him. Was this just a coincidence?
In May 2020, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Commerce to petition the Federal Communications Commission to define the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The courts have proclaimed that Section 230 provides sweeping immunity for Big Tech platforms for both censorship and the content they display. In doing so, Trump’s ultimate goal was to eliminate the censorship of constitutionally protected free speech.
However, less than a year later, following Jan. 6, Trump was de-platformed in unison by nearly every one of the largest social media companies. Four months after that, Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order in May 2021.
It should be noted that Trump also took action against TikTok, but not to censor speech. Rather, Trump issued an ultimatum via executive order requiring TikTok to divest from ByteDance, the communist Chinese government-tied parent company of the popular video app. Other opponents of TikTok made separate arguments based on censoring certain posts that contain offensive speech.
Trump’s ultimatum, far different from calling for censorship of speech that he disapproved of, was due to concerns over privacy breaches and communist propaganda infiltrating American users' feeds, as well as the national security threat posed by the communist Chinese government-tied app hoovering up Americans’ data.
Trump has since reversed his opposition to TikTok, citing concerns that such a ban would empower other Big Tech companies, like Meta, which Trump labeled an “enemy of the people.”
Joe Biden, 2020 Democratic Nominee for President
Biden has led an Executive Branch that has been one of the most antagonistic, and even hostile, toward free speech in the nation's history.
The White House and its Executive Branch agencies have been directly involved in numerous attempts to censor constitutionally protected freedom of speech, including with the temporary creation of the Disinformation Governance Board and efforts to silence Americans on a bevy of important social and political issues through social media collaboration and collusion with private partners and public universities.
According to two MRC bombshell reports released in January 2024, Biden has expanded efforts to stifle free speech by exploiting tax dollars, such as State Department seminars on how to silence critics that equipped teachers to utilize censorship tools in their classrooms.
Biden also funneled funds from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grant program to the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab in a bid to silence Americans nationwide.
In addition, Biden himself called for more censorship on Meta platforms when he suggested that a lack of content moderation was “killing” people. “They’re killing people—I mean they’re really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden whined on July 16, 2021. “And they’re killing people.”
This was just the tip of the iceberg. The Twitter Files revealed that the Biden administration colluded with social media companies to silence any content they disliked about the pandemic. This blatant collusion led to a massive lawsuit, Murthy v. Missouri, which the Supreme Court dismissed—not on its merits but due to standing issues.
The Biden-led DHS was also accused of creating the now-defunct Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of pro-censorship academics who facilitated the online Big Tech crackdown against free speech.
Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic Nominee for President
In the wake of her 2016 defeat, Clinton has spent years airing her grievances about how online free speech contributed to her loss to Trump. She now claims it could undermine the 2024 election between Harris and Trump. Clinton’s solution? Lock up those who dissent.
“I think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases, criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence” because it is unlikely any Russians will stand trial in the U.S., she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Sept. 16.
During an interview with PBS’s Margaret Hoover on Sept. 27, Clinton cynically sounded the alarm about an alleged October surprise tied to misinformation. “I anticipate something will happen in October, as it always does. … There will be concerted efforts to distort and pervert Kamala Harris, who she is, what she stands for, what she's done,” the former Democrat presidential candidate warned.
And, of course, Clinton had a solution: “The press needs a consistent narrative about the danger that Trump poses.”
Clinton later made equally disturbing anti-free speech remarks on Oct. 5, claiming during an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish that without content moderation — the left’s phrase for censorship — “we lose total control.”
Clinton specifically beseeched about the need for “guardrails” and “regulation.” She added, “We should be, in my view, appealing something called section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be pass-throughs that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted—but we now know that was an overly simple view.”
Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican Nominee for President
Romney, Obama’s opponent in the 2012 election, seemingly endorsed the government-Big Tech collusion to censor free speech online.
During a congressional hearing in July 2023, he defended the false notion that the government can use its power to induce outside organizations to do what it is prohibited to do itself. Romney claimed the First Amendment permits federal employees to pressure social media officials about content they dislike.
“Employees of the federal government have First Amendment rights, too,” Romney said, responding to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) efforts to ban federal employees from infringing on the freedom of speech by conspiring with Big Tech platforms. “Censorship is when the government shuts something off. This is arguing to try to convince somebody else to shut it off and that’s the right people have whether they’re in government or outside of government.”
This tortured logic, of course, contradicts clear Supreme Court precedent.
Romney also threw his support behind banning TikTok—and for wholly anti-free speech reasons. He suggested that TikTok featured an “overwhelming” number of “mentions of Palestinians,” likely in response to the Oct. 7 terror attack.
Romney seemingly pushed for censorship in response to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who alleged, “You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates.”
In response, Romney stated, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
These assertions drew the ire of critics, who accused the Utah senator of threatening to violate the First Amendment by attempting to suppress discussions on the platform. However, these concerns largely ignore accusations that China, one of America’s adversaries, is actively trying to influence public opinion by manipulating content on TikTok.
Barack Obama, 2008 and 2012 Democratic Nominee for President
Obama has been far from shy about his sentiments about free speech.
During a speech at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center on April 21, 2022, Obama declared it was time to “pick a side” on whether Big Tech companies should be subjected to government regulations that incentivize them to censor free speech online. He warned that without speech regulation, democracies were at risk due to “disinformation.”
Obama added, “Each of us, whether we work at a tech company or consume social media, whether we are a parent, a legislator, an advertiser on one of these platforms, now’s the time to pick a side. We have a choice right now. Do we allow our democracy to wither or do we make it better?”
McCain, Obama’s opponent in the 2008 election, is known as the chief architect of a controversial law dubbed “McCain-Feingold” that restricted associations—except for government and establishment media—from engaging in political speech. MRC researchers did not find statements of him calling for online censorship.
In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down the law's so-called expenditure caps or speech bans. However, the Court left doxxing provisions intact—meaning the federal government still requires donations to be logged. Meanwhile, legacy media, which continues to benefit leftist campaigns through biased coverage, faces no such requirement to disclose their contributions.
In 2018, McCain lost his battle with glioblastoma, long before the conversation on Big Tech censorship took off.
John Kerry, 2004 Democratic Nominee for President
After his defeat in the 2004 presidential election, Kerry served as Obama’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2017, then as Biden’s climate advisor from 2021 to 2024 and now by positioning himself as an enemy of free speech.
During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum on Sept. 29, Kerry responded to a question about disinformation by lamenting that the First Amendment stood “as a major block to the ability to hammer it out of existence.”
He added, “What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
MRC could not identify former President George W. Bush's comments calling for online censorship in the 2004 election, and the same applies to the 2000 election.
Al Gore, 2000 Democratic Nominee for President
Gore is yet another Democrat who has recklessly thrown his support behind censorship. Speaking at the Bloomberg Green event during COP28 in December 2023, Gore lashed out at social media algorithms, saying they should be banned.
“If you have social media that is dominated by algorithms that pull people down these rabbit holes that are a bit like pitcher plants, these algorithms, they are the digital equivalent of AR-15s,” he claimed. “They ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned. It’s an abuse of the public forum.”
Gore further claimed that algorithms could result in threats to democracies.
“And you spend too much time in the echo chamber, what’s weaponized is another form of AI—not artificial intelligence, artificial insanity,” he continued. “I’m serious. I’m serious. QAnon is just the best-known version of artificial insanity. And these devices are the enemies of self-government, and they’re the enemies of democracy. We need reforms for both democracy and capitalism.”
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.
