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The White House and Congress are working on a deal to clamp down on what US citizens are allowed to say online. According to new reporting by Axios, the Trump administration is negotiating with key senators in an effort to shoehorn a massive legislation package which would limit states’ abilities to regulate AI in exchange for placing broad federal limits on digital speech.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Trump administration’s push to revoke AI regulation from individual states. Though the White House and its allies frame this as a matter of “safety” and “national security,” the timing is telling, coming as progressive state governments move to restrict the building of AI data centers and hold tech companies liable for harms their AI systems cause.
What makes this deal particularly insidious is the trade-off at its core. Per Axios, congressional lawmakers lead by Republican Marsha Blackburn are essentially offering to surrender their ability to regulate AI in exchange for three federal censorship bills: the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and a federal age verification mandate.
While the language around these three measures suggests common-sense cyber regulation, activists say they really amount to a massive censorship regime that is fundamentally anti-democratic.
In a blistering statement, the first amendment group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warns that “taken together, these bills would fundamentally change the internet as we know it.” That’s especially striking because FIRE is funded by conservative private interests like billionaire Charles Koch, meaning its opposition highlights the degree to which Trump is butting heads against fellow members of the US ruling class.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KORA) for example, would force social media giants to restrict lawful speech based on Federal Trade Commission regulations. FIRE complains that this would give the federal government too much power to hold platforms like Meta accountable for their harms — which, many would argue, is long overdue. But given that just a few corporations own the vast majority of web infrastructure and social media, KORA would give the Trump-controlled FTC major power to bend the internet to its will.
To put this power into perspective, just regulating Meta’s Instagram would impact about 71 percent of US citizens who say they regularly use the app.
It’s a powerful weapon, in other words — and like any weapon, it matters a great deal who wields it. Should the White House and Congress push KORA through, it’s likely it would functionally end the possibility of surfing the internet anonymously, while supercharging Trump’s efforts to criminalize left wing opposition groups in the US.
Whether it passes will depend on some shrewd maneuvering on the Trump administration’s part to secure Congressional support. But it all underscores a frustrating reality of AI regulation in the US: Americans overwhelmingly support stricter regulation on AI — but with the current cabal running the Oval Office, there’s no guarantee that the cure won’t be worse than the disease.
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