Vice President J.D. Vance said big tech companies remain on “very much notice” to respect constitutional free speech rights Despite the new administration's support from the Silicon Valley Titans.
Vance said CBS's “Face the Nation” President Trump on Sunday said he is ready to act if tech giants continue practices that conservatives perceive as censorship.
“We fundamentally believe that big technology has too much power,” Vance said.
“They can respect the constitutional rights of Americans or stop engaging in censorship and face the consequences under the leadership of Donald Trump.”
During the interview, Vance also clashed with “Face the Nation's” Margaret Brennan over Trump's decision to end the refugee program that has barred hundreds of Afghans from reaching the United States.
Despite Trump's embrace of big tech since the Nov. 5 election, the president and his supporters have shown anti-conservative bias by moderating content in ways that stifle free expression. I still have long-standing grievances with social media platforms that are said to be
After taking office in 2021, Trump accused Google of suppressing favorable news coverage about him.
He also criticized Zuckerberg's meta-platform, which banned him from Facebook and Instagram following Capitol Riots on January 6, 2021.
Since Trump's reelection in November, several tech CEOs have made overtures to the administration, attending his Mar-a-Lago event and contributing to his first fund.
Notable participants include metaboss Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and X owner Musk.
In particular, Zuckerberg has sought to mend relations with the administration, reversing long-standing tensions.
Earlier this month, Metachief announced that the company would be ending its third-party fact-checking program.
Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, acknowledged that the company's moderation system had gone “too far” and led to undue restrictions on free expression.
Trump's hostility toward tech platforms escalated during his first term.
In 2020, Twitter, now known as X, fact-checked and flagged Trump's posts about mail-in voting and the George Floyd protests, leading him to accuse the platform of censorship.
Trump responded by signing an executive order seeking to limit liability protections for social media companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
In October 2020, the Post published a report based on emails obtained from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, raising concerns about potential corruption.
Major social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, have limited the distribution of articles, citing concerns of misinformation, sparking debate over censorship and the influence of tech companies on political discourse.
Despite initial claims by intelligence chiefs that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation,” investigators later acknowledged the emails were genuine.
After the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump's accounts and cited posts they said incited violence.
Musk reinstated Trump's Twitter account after taking the platform in 2022, while Meta reinstated Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in January 2023 after a two-year suspension.
