From Newsrooms to AI, Federal Power Enforces One Standard: Loyalty

In July 2025, the Federal Trade Commission opened a public inquiry into how the big platforms decide what users see, and its chairman announced the standard up front: moderation was a betrayal of the country's values and possibly a crime. ^[1]

Censorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal. — Federal Trade Commission

Since then, two platform practices have fit that description exactly. One belongs to Google. Its AI Overviews, the machine-written summaries attached to search results, declined to appear for questions about Donald Trump's cognitive decline while answering the same questions about Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush. That is an invisible, one-directional choice about what the country learns about a president, and in the year since it became public, no federal agency has touched it. ^[2] The other practice belongs to YouTube, and here the government is moving. The FTC has spent recent weeks preparing a consumer-protection lawsuit over YouTube's suspension and demotion policies, among them the suspension of Trump's own account, on Chairman Andrew Ferguson's theory that moderation contradicting a platform's stated policy is consumer deception. ^[3] Both fit the announced standard. Federal action is being readied against exactly one of them, the one that touched the president. The method scales, and its freshest appearance is at the White House gate. This weekend, Secret Service officers confiscated the press badges of CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists, carrying out a ban Trump announced on Truth Social, and he told the New York Times and the Washington Post they could be next unless their coverage changed. ^[4] The impulse is older than the week. The Associated Press spent the opening months of 2025 barred from the Oval Office over the administration's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and the access fights have since landed in court. ^[5] Beyond the gates, every lever has been pulled at once. The Justice Department and FBI have served subpoenas and seized reporters' devices; the FCC has opened license challenges and investigations into whether networks distorted the news; the FTC has gone after the media watchdogs NewsGuard and Media Matters; the Pentagon has curtailed access and fired the leadership of the military's own paper, Stars and Stripes. ^[6] The FTC has also demanded documents from the world's largest ad agencies on Elon Musk's complaint of an organized boycott, an inquiry opened on an ally's grievance and pointed at businesses that stopped funding his platform. ^[7] The White House calls all of it accountability. Its communications director, Steven Cheung, has said the administration will use every tool at its disposal against outlets it accuses of knowingly spreading false information. ^[6] The FCC is where the doctrine is most explicit. Trump has said in public that critical broadcasters' licenses should be taken away, and that relentlessly one-sided coverage has forfeited its claim to free-speech protection. ^[8] Last September, after the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Chairman Brendan Carr warned ABC to deal with Jimmy Kimmel on its own or the commission would step in. ^[9] Disney, ABC's parent, has since sued over the reviews of its eight biggest-market station licenses, calling them retaliation for programming the president attacked; the commission answers that the reviews concern its inquiries into the company's diversity hiring. ^[10] And Carr has now taken up a question no Congress ever put in a regulator's job description, whether a daytime talk show is news.

Disney and The View have not established that that program is, in fact, bona fide news. — Brendan Carr

On motive, the president has been less careful.

I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about. — Donald Trump

That candor also explains the front that gets treated as a separate policy: artificial intelligence. Here the government litigates rather than regulates, and it litigates for the industry's anti-safety side. The Justice Department joined Musk's company xAI in its suit to strike down Colorado's AI-safety law, the federal government in court on behalf of an ally's company and against a state rule meant to protect the products' users. ^[11] The assistant attorney general who signed the filing, Harmeet Dhillon, was explicit about the enemy.

Laws that require AI companies to infect their products with woke DEI ideology are illegal. — Harmeet Dhillon

The one serious check on the industry this administration weighed from inside government, it killed from inside. An executive order that would have had federal agencies review frontier models, the most powerful AI systems, before their release was scrapped hours before signing, after lobbying by Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the White House's own AI adviser David Sacks; Trump said the pre-release checks could have cost the country its lead. ^[12] As for the loudest charge in the field, that the labs colluded to slow their work, no federal agency is carrying it. It lives entirely in private lawsuits: Musk's amended claim against OpenAI and Microsoft, demanding as much as $150 billion, and the class action filed September 19 against Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google over their coordination to pace development, the same coordination Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, had proposed publicly days earlier while asking the government to mediate or bless it. ^[13][14] On this front, the government files briefs for the labs, not against them. None of this makes the whole government a loyalty weapon. The Justice Department has spent close to a year investigating Andreessen Horowitz, close Trump allies and donors, over board seats held at competing AI data companies in violation of the Clayton Act's ban on interlocking directorates, one person sitting on the boards of rivals. ^[15] The major antitrust cases against Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon are proceeding under this administration. ^[16] The direction holds in the information layer, not everywhere. Even there, the resistance is real. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the FTC's probe of Media Matters as likely retaliation and pretext, by which point the watchdog had spent roughly $15 million defending itself. ^[17] A federal judge in Miami dismissed Trump's $1 billion defamation suit against the New York Times as a public relations document. ^[18] Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel under Carr's threats, then reversed the suspension within days after backlash from both parties. ^[19] The courts keep breaking pieces off. The aim has not moved. The sharpest warning about that aim has come from inside the president's own party. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has been telling Republicans where the FCC's new habits lead.

I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we're going to decide what speech we like and what we don't, and we're going to threaten to take you off air if we don't like what you're saying. — Ted Cruz

That is a senior Republican conceding what the year shows: the instrument is personal, and the precedent will not be. The next test is already on the calendar. The week of October 5, Judge AliKhan takes up the FCC's motion to dismiss ABC's First Amendment lawsuit, and with it the question underneath a year of enforcement: whether the stations picked for license review and the programming the president attacked were the same list. ^[10]