The cumulative effect on educators has been a climate of anxiety and self-censorship. As one Florida school media specialist put it, “We’re looking over our shoulders. It’s like a witch hunt – you don’t know when a parent’s Facebook post will lead to an investigation, a lawsuit, or you being villainized on the evening news”. The stakes can indeed be high: some of these new laws carry criminal penalties or hefty fines for educators who “violate” them. Iowa’s law threatened misdemeanors for teachers with banned books on their shelves iowacapitaldispatch.com . An Oklahoma bill (not passed) proposed fining teachers $10,000 for each instance of teaching banned concepts. This has led many to simply avoid any remotely controversial topic – a loss for student learning that is hard to quantify but deeply felt.
Republican Attempts to Control Online Media and Social Platforms
Parallel to battles over books and traditional media, Republican officials – often echoing Trump – have pursued the idea that social media and tech companies are “censoring” conservative views, and they have attempted to regulate online content moderation. This has produced a curious phenomenon: laws that ostensibly fight censorship by private companies but in effect impose government mandates on online speech. Critics argue these efforts violate the First Amendment rights of platforms, and so far courts have been split on the issue.
The charge of anti-conservative bias in tech took off during Trump’s presidency, especially after Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube banned Trump in January 2021 for inciting violence (following the January 6 Capitol attack). Many on the right were outraged that tech CEOs could silence a sitting (or former) President and other voices. Trump himself had long accused Silicon Valley of bias – as president he even hosted a “Social Media Summit” in 2019 full of right-wing influencers complaining of censorship. In May 2020, after Twitter appended fact-check labels to a couple of Trump’s misleading tweets, Trump issued an “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship”. This order directed regulators to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that shields platforms from liability for user content and allows them to moderate in “good faith.” Trump’s executive order sought to curb Section 230’s protections, essentially by having the FCC and FTC find ways to punish companies for what Trump called “selective censorship” of user posts cfr.org . Legal experts widely denounced the order as toothless and unconstitutional (since the FCC has no authority to rewrite Section 230, and the First Amendment protects platforms’ editorial decisions). Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s DOJ also proposed legislation to weaken Section 230, and Trump went so far as to threaten a veto of a crucial defense spending bill if it didn’t include a full repeal of Section 230 cfr.org cfr.org . (In the end, Congress passed the defense bill without the repeal, Trump vetoed it, and Congress overrode his veto – a rare rebuke – in the final days of 2020.)
It was in the states, however, that Trump’s allies took the most concrete action on this front. In 2021, Florida and Texas – led by Republican governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott – enacted first-of-their-kind laws regulating social media content moderation. These laws were direct responses to Trump’s de-platforming and the broader belief (not supported by empirical evidence) that Big Tech “censors” conservatives. Governor DeSantis explicitly cited Twitter banning Trump as impetus, saying Florida must protect citizens from “Silicon Valley elites” who “silence conservative voices” vox.com .
Florida’s law (SB 7072, the Stop Social Media Censorship Act), signed in May 2021, did several things: