The Federal Trade Commission under President Donald Trump will not tolerate pro-censorship Big Tech monopolies, according to the agency’s new chairman Andrew Ferguson.
Ferguson drew the connection between Big Tech’s abuse of market power and aggressive social media censorship during Tuesday’s Free State Foundation 17th Annual Policy Conference. Ferguson promised the audience that he is “looking for exercises of market power that might reveal themselves in censorship.”
Ferguson admitted that the FTC is not “the censorship police.” However, he added that “we are the market power police, and so, if companies with monopoly power are using their monopoly power to degrade their product quality or deny consumers choices, including by censoring their speech, that is a potential antitrust problem.”
He added, “If companies are colluding on what type of speech they’re going to permit on their platforms, that collusion is a potential antitrust problem. And if companies have terms of service, and they are deplatforming people in violation of their terms of service, that is a potential violation of the consumer protection laws that the commission enforces.”
Ferguson emphasized that Big Tech has lost its favor among both the general public and government regulators, including himself. He noted that Americans have become increasingly aware of the power that Big Tech’s wields over them, adding, “I think a lot of people really started to understand what that power could look like in 2020: COVID, the election, the George Floyd riots, censorship, censorship that carried on into the Biden administration.”
According to the FTC chairman, the abuses by Big Tech during this period created a consensus among Americans and regulators to take action against large platforms such as Google, which was labeled as having a monopoly in “general search services” in a 2024 ruling.
In a March 13 interview with CNBC, Ferguson further elaborated on his approach to Big Tech censorship. Ferguson responded to a question from CNBC Correspondent Eamon Javers about why Ferguson sees Big Tech or other large corporations using their powerful market position to push a polarizing agenda as “threatening to Americans.” Ferguson mentioned corporations pushing their radical positions on customers (i.e. Gender Theory, DEI, environmentalism), before explaining:
“[I]f companies feel like they can alienate half of their consumer base without suffering any real competitive consequences, we probably have a competition problem. But that's what I care about is competition. It's not the political messaging itself. That's not my job. My job is to protect Americans from the abuse of market power. And if market power makes it possible for companies to censor or to push a social agenda that is really alienating to Americans, I care about the market power, not the message. That's my job as an antitrust enforcer, is [to] protect Americans from the abuse of market power.”
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.
