Former Biden administration officials clearly haven’t given up on censoring free speech online, and their push for artificial intelligence regulation shows it remains on their agenda.
At a recent Brookings Institution event, several Biden-era officials revealed that if Democrats return to power, Americans have more censorship to look forward to. Narda Jones, the former chief of staff to Biden-appointed FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, made some particularly disturbing comments boasting that the Biden FCC used already existing regulations and laws “creatively” to censor AI.
When asked why America has not instituted authoritarian regulations like Europe, Jones indicated a “longer term” goal that would require “regime change to have more of a political will and energy around addressing some of the problems we've talked about today.”
Jones made these appalling remarks during the second panel of a Brookings event, “The future of the internet in the age of AI.” Her panel also included two other Biden administration officials, Alex Engler, a former assistant director of AI policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Soribel Feliz, a former AI advisor at the Department of Homeland Security. Feliz has worked at Microsoft and also at Meta, where she did “Trust & Safety” work, a common euphemism for censorship. In addition to her work at the FCC, Jones also worked for the Biden OSTP.
During the panel, these former Biden administration officials promoted anti-free speech ideas in America and abroad. MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider saw their intentions right away:
“These would-be censors are shadow government officials, waiting in the wings to rejoin a Democrat administration if they win in 2028. This is not an academic exercise, but a practical, very intentional effort to apply European-style censorship on Americans. And they’re pushing for this barely a year after Americans decisively chose free speech and kicked Biden, his cronies on that stage and his 57 censorship initiatives to the curb.”
In fact, multiple panelists pushed for European censorship to impact American companies. Former Meta Fairness and Equity Lead Miranda Bogen lamented that the Trump administration has pushed back against anti-free speech governments like Brazil and the European Union. Otherwise, Bogen suggested that the regulations imposed would “reverberate outward” beyond the people who actually live under those governments. She also criticized Trump for revoking the U.S. visas of censorship-tied foreign nationals.
Engler called it a “good sign” that the EU had hit Elon Musk’s X with an $140 million fine, purportedly over the platform's blue check system, advertiser transparency and being insufficiently open to researchers. Notably, Engler brushed past these feeble excuses, celebrating that the EU fined Musk despite the Trump administration’s warnings and saying he hoped that the EU would enforce more legislation against Big Tech.
Despite celebrating this move by the anti-free speech EU, Engler warned that “the civil society field” was currently hesitant towards supporting anti-free speech regulation in the United States. First, Engler stated the obvious: "The tools that you would use to govern online speech in an algorithmically mediated way are also super useful tools if you're an autocrat trying to censor or suppress people.
Then he revealed that anti-free speech advocates had learned nothing from handing over the reins of power to their political opponents. Engler added, "If you talk to anyone in the civil society field, they will say there is going to be an extreme reticence to do things that we might otherwise have considered doing or considered pushing for legislatively with a really sort-of more trustworthy executive branch."
Notably, Engler served in an administration that aggressively enacted 57 radical censorship initiatives, which the Media Research Center has documented across 93 federal agencies. One of his fellow panelists, Jones, alluded to one of these efforts, an FCC crackdown on political speech during the 2024 election, listed by MRC in its report as Censorship initiative #49. After discussing her efforts, Jones complained that Trump had gone in a different direction. Later in the event, Jones credited the Biden FCC for “creatively” finding ways to regulate AI during an election.
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