In early December, Joshua Aaron, the developer behind the ICEBlock app — designed to let people alert others about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — filed a federal lawsuit alleging his First Amendment rights were violated. The Department of Justice had urged Apple to remove Aaron’s app from its App Store, which the suit called unconstitutional. And Apple had complied — in the process, setting its own precedent for suppressing anti-ICE speech.
The year 2025 has marked perhaps the biggest leap back for American free speech in generations. The Trump administration’s war on immigrants and civil liberties has led it to attempt to deport organizers and researchers over political speech, weaponize the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on disfavored broadcast shows, and file multiple frivolous lawsuits against journalists that covered Trump, many of which reached settlements that look a lot like shakedowns.
Immigration restrictions, heavy-handed regulation, civil lawsuits, bad-faith prosecutions — these are all longtime tools to shut down speech and criticism. But the administration has also moved to control private speech gatekeepers. With the formalization of the deal to sell TikTok to a consortium including the Ellison-helmed Oracle coming in just under the wire, we are ending 2025 with every major social media platform fully or partially controlled by Trump-friendly US billionaires, the same year that, for the first time, most people in the country reported getting their news from social media. The consolidation of social media control and its broad influence give the administration a very powerful, newer tool, one that ironically began as an effort to preserve and protect online discourse: content moderation.
We are ending 2025 with every major social media platform fully or partially controlled by Trump-friendly US billionaires
The Trump administration had suggested, without evidence, that ICEBlock put agents at risk. His is the first such lawsuit after big tech companies went on a spree of blocking his and similar tools, including Eyes Up, an app that was designed to archive and catalog footage of past ICE operations. For all of these takedowns, platforms like Apple and Google cited supposed violations of content policies, including, notably, removing Red Dot and DeICER by classifying ICE agents as a vulnerable group.
“I talked to a couple of sort of longtime trust and safety people who did this kind of work inside platforms for years, and they were like, ‘we can’t speak to Apple’s policy, but I’ve never seen a policy like that, where cops are a protected class,’” said Daphne Keller, a onetime associate general counsel at Google who is now director of platform regulation at the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology. “My read on the situation is that they really needed to make this concession to the government for whatever reason — because of whatever pressure they were under or whatever benefit they thought they would get from making the concession — and they did it, and then they had to find an excuse.”
Platform content moderation is a notion only about as old as the relatively new social media and technology platforms themselves, but has generally been understood to be a balance between free expression and the need to protect vulnerable groups or populations. The inversion of this concept — using moderation to restrict speech to protect the state acting against vulnerable populations — is a disconcerting and relatively new phenomenon here in the United States, though one that has already become a modus operandi elsewhere.
Platform content moderation is a notion only about as old as the relatively new social media and technology platforms themselves
One Carnegie Endowment paper published last year, focused on India and Thailand, detailed how governments in those countries had used the language and infrastructure of platforms’ content moderation and community standards systems to restrain criticism and push a message. India under Narendra Modi, for example, had imposed “national security” restrictions that were mostly levied against civil society, using a multipronged approach of legal, economic, and political pressure.
Sangeeta Mahapatra, a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and a coauthor of the paper, stressed that while researchers are loath to extrapolate findings too much to new contexts with their own complexities, it was clear the US government was walking the same path. “We have seen this game played so many times that by now there is a kind of predictability,” she said. “The wolves are right at the door. You realize how this is an everyday phenomenon. It’s not something that is episodic, these kinds of intrusions into your life and the starring role that a platform plays, not just as an enabler, but as a proactive enabler.”
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