Donald Trump Picks Brendan Carr, Who Has Attacked Tech Platforms For Content Moderation Practices, As Next FCC Chair
Donald Trump has picked Brendan Carr to serve as his next FCC chairman, selecting the senior Republican on the commission who has promised to rein in Big Tech.
Carr’s choice had been expected. Trump nominated Carr to serve on the FCC in his first term.
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Trump said in a statement, “Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy. He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”
Carr will succeed Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed by President Joe Biden and is the first woman to permanently hold the post.
While Republican majorities traditionally usher in deregulation, and Carr has called for a “top-to-bottom review” of FCC regulations, he has been a frequent critic of private tech platforms and, more recently, of networks for their content decisions.
For years, Carr has railed against social media for what he characterizes as efforts to stifle conservative voices, even though companies deny such systematic discrimination takes place. Carr authored a portion of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that is calling for moves that could impose new liability for social media giants in the way that they moderate their content.
More specifically, Carr wants the FCC to issue an order that limits the immunity platforms enjoy from Section 230, the provisions of a 1996 law that shield tech companies from lawsuits for third party content they host on their sites.
Carr wrote in Project 2025 that the FCC should take actions that would “appropriately limit the number of cases in which a platform can censor with the benefit of Section 230’s protections.” Carr also supports congressional action that would restrict social media platforms from suspending or banning users for their viewpoints.
Major internet companies are likely to challenge such an approach as a violation of the First Amendment. And in Project 2025, Carr acknowledged that other conservatives disagree, writing that there are those “who do not think that the FCC or Congress should act in a way that regulates the content-moderation decisions of private platforms. One of the main arguments that this group offers is that doing so would intrude— unlawfully in their view—on the First Amendment rights of corporations to exclude content from their private platforms.”
Carr also has criticized NBC for featuring Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live just days before the presidential election. The network gave time to Donald Trump’s campaign the next day, but even after Trump’s victory, Carr continued to chide the network, and even encouraged other presidential candidates to file an equal time complaint.
The network is obligated to provide equal time if a candidate requests it. The public interest group Free Press said that Carr was making “grossly inaccurate claims about communications law to win points with the former president.”
The FCC has historically stayed out of news editorial decisions. During the presidential campaign, when Trump said that CBS should lose its broadcast license for the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris, Carr called for the show to release a transcript of the interview. CBS has refused. (The FCC licenses individual stations, not networks).
Last week, Carr fired off a letter to Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, accusing them of silencing “Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights.”
“The censorship cartel must be dismantled,” Carr wrote on X.
Carr claimed that their work with NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news sites and provides services like brand safety and misinformation tracking for advertisers and others. Carr wrote that NewsGuard was “leveraging its partnerships with advertising agencies to effectively [censor] targeted outlets.”
But Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO and co-editor in chief of NewsGuard, said in a statement that Carr’s claims rely on false reports about the rating system from outlets like right-wing site Newsmax, which received a low credibility score. NewsGuard rated it 20 out of 100 on its “nutrition label,” concluding that it is “unreliable because it servely violates basic journalistic standards.”
“Our work does not involve any censorship or blocking of speech at all,” Crovitz said. “Instead of blocking information, we provide users with apolitical reliability analysis. Instead of censorship, we provide users with more information — reliability ratings of news publishers based on apolitical criteria and a transparent journalistic process — so that each user can make informed decisions about which information to trust.”
Crovitz also noted that “because we rate news sites apolitically, many conservative sites get higher ratings from us than liberal sites get, such as Fox news getting a higher score than MSNBC and The Washington Examiner outscoring The New York Times. Again, Newsmax may not like our ratings, but there is no excuse for them to seek to excuse their low rating or to mislead Commissioner Carr.”
Crovitz also raised concerns about Carr’s targeting of a private entity, saying that NewsGuard’s “journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, and we’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly, to rely on false claims, to benefit the very publishers who make the false claims, such as Newsmax.”
Trump and his allies have attacked other fact checking sites and media watchdogs, while Elon Musk, who will help lead a new effort to reorganize the federal government, has sued Media Matters for its reporting on his social media platform, X. Musk also sued advertisers who removed their sponsorship from X out of concern that their ads would appear next to white supremacist and extreme posts.
It has been a tradition for the incumbent FCC chair to step down when a new administration takes power. That would allow Trump to nominate an additional commissioner and give Republicans a 3-2 majority.
In Project 2025, Carr also disagreed with Trump in another area: TikTok. The incoming FCC chairman called for a ban on social media platform on national security grounds. After initially trying to ban TikTok in his first term, Trump now opposes such a move.
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