War Room co-host Natalie Winters discussed how President Trump and his incoming administration can end government censorship on speech with FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson on Saturday.
“We’ve got one where we have like purely private censorship, where I think there is two kinds. You could have decisions being made by sort of the platforms themselves or potentially in tandem with each other where the goal is to suppress you know, disfavored speech,” Ferguson responding to Winters question about censorship.
Ferguson also talked about advertising cartels and how it violates anti-trust laws if they agree to not advertise on a particular platform. He explained that this is a potential way advertisers would target a platform or show that promoted free speech.
“The risk of potential advertising cartels, so generally under our anti-trust laws private companies can sort of decide what they would like to do with their own resources but one of the most important things the anti-trust laws forbid is people getting in a room and agreeing we are not going to compete,” Ferguson said.
“The anti-trust laws are designed to make sure that all of us get to participate in markets freely and fairly and that there isn’t a bunch of back door dealing among competitors to suppress people or ideas,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson also said that President Trump’s victory was very important to prevent platforms from colluding with agencies like the CDC, FBI, etc.
“We saw this during Covid especially, where the platforms would collaborate, collude however you want to call it with government officials at the CDC, the Surgeon General’s office, the State Department, the FBI and CISA, where the government would call over the platforms and say hey we don’t like this thing being said about the vaccines, we don’t like this thing being said about Covid origins, you know labs and the like, we don’t like this sort of discussion about what happened in the 2020 Presidential election,” Ferguson said.
“Some states sued the government back in 2021 and said hey, or 2022 and said hey, the government is coercing the platforms to take down speech that they don’t like,” Ferguson explained.
Winters had asked about how the left will pivot to continue in censorship in response to the upcoming changes with a Trump Presidency.
“We have this problem where we have like two different types of governments. We have the government that we elect at the ballot box, which is the President who selects his cabinet, but then we have this massive bureaucratic apparatus underneath them that have been here before the election and they think they are gonna be here after the election,” Ferguson said.
“I think that President Trump’s election gives a real opportunity to the government and to us as Americans to address that problem which is how do we get control of sort of the administrative state or the deep state which is another name for it that sort of operates independently of the political part of the government that you and I had voted for,” Ferguson continued.
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