Vice President JD Vance said big tech companies remain “very much on notice” to respect constitutional free speech rights, despite support for the new administration from Silicon Valley titans.
Vance told CBS it “faces the nation on Sunday that President Trump is prepared to act if the tech giants continue practices that conservatives perceive as censorship.
“We fundamentally believe that big technology has a lot of power,” Vance said.
“They can either respect the constitutional rights of Americans, stop engaging in censorship or face the consequences under the leadership of Donald Trump.”
During the interview, Vance also clashed with “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan over Trump’s decision to halt a refugee program that barred hundreds of Afghans from reaching the US.
Despite Trump’s bear embrace of Big Tech since the Nov. 5 election, the president and his supporters still have years of complaints against social media platforms that allegedly have an anti-conservative bias by moderating content in ways they see as suppression of free free expression.
After leaving office in 2021, Trump accused Google of suppressing news coverage favorable to him.
He also criticized Zuckerberg’s meta platforms for banning him from Facebook and Instagram after the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riots.
Since Trump’s re-election in November, several tech CEOs have made passes for the administration, attending his events at Mar-A-Lago and contributing to his inaugural fund.
Notable attendees included meta boss Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and X owner Musk, who has become one of Trump’s top advisers.
In particular, Zuckerberg has sought to improve relations with the administration, reversing years of tension.
Earlier this month, Meta’s boss announced that the company would end its third-party fact-checking program, a move praised by Trump.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, admitted that the company’s moderation systems had “gone too far,” leading to excessive restrictions on free expression.
Trump’s hostility to 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 attempting to limit the liability protections of 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 possible corruption.
Major social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, restricted distribution of the article, citing misinformation concerns that have fueled debates 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 admitted the emails were authentic.
After the January 6, 2021 riots, Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts, citing posts they said incited violence.
Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account after winning the platform in 2022, while Meta reinstated Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in January 2023 after a two-year suspension.
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