'Direct assault on reality': Watchdog group slams Trump's 'censorship' executive order

President Donald Trump's new executive order on social media was immediately condemned in a statement by Nina Jankowicz, the president of the watchdog group American Sunlight Project, who called it a "direct assault on reality."

The order, billed as a directive against "censorship," effectively ends any efforts by federal agencies to coordinate with social media companies and other large internet platforms on fact-checking misinformation about elections, medicine, and other topics of public interest — a long-running goal of right-wing activists who claim that such fact-checks are attempts to stifle conservative expression online.

“Let’s be clear: responding to disinformation is not ‘censorship’ — it’s a vital safeguard against those who lie to erode our democracy and undermine trust in our institutions," said Jankowicz. “As the Supreme Court made clear in its dismissal of Murthy v. Missouri, those who falsely alleged that the government, researchers, and tech companies were engaged in a censorship conspiracy 'fail[ed]... to link their past social-media restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms.' Yet the Trump administration and tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk continue to opportunistically repeat lies the conservative Supreme Court debunked."

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In reality, the statement argued, “What Trump’s Executive Order on ‘Ending Federal Censorship’ really does is chill critical speech about bad actors who use disinformation as a tool to destabilize our country and profit from lies. Disinformation is not a partisan issue; it’s a democracy issue. America’s adversaries benefit when our country is internally divided and politically polarized."

“That White House policy has canonized lies and conspiracy theories about those responding to disinformation further emboldens both foreign actors and disinformation profiteers who continue to pollute our information environment with falsehoods designed to enrage Americans and pit us against one another," Jankowicz warned. "Never one to break character, President Trump seeks vengeance for a slight that never happened."

All of this comes as tech platforms were already looking to scale back fact-checking operations that were put in place around the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Most recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the elimination of fact-checking on Facebook posts, to be replaced with a user-driven comment system similar to the Community Notes feature on Elon Musk's X.