Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson on Wednesday raised the prospect of further action in response to the 2021 removal of President Donald Trump from social media platforms.
“I’m not saying there was collusion” among the social media platforms that took down Trump’s account as he vocally challenged his 2020 election loss, Ferguson said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit. “But the coincidence of this suggests — maybe purely conscious parallelism — or collusion. And if it’s the latter, it’s a real problem.”
In response to an executive order issued during Trump’s first term, the FTC in February launched an inquiry into tech censorship, asking for public comments from people alleging harm by platforms that restricted their speech.
“No one has ever investigated what was happening in 2020, 2021, when all these platforms seemed to march in lock step on an issue for which there isn’t objective inputs,” he said.
Ferguson was referencing the period around the 2020 presidential election in which many conservatives believed their political viewpoints online, largely regarding the pandemic and the election, were being hidden or taken down — something they say disproportionately impacted their own ideological voices. Trump has said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plotted against him during that election and “steered” Facebook against him.
“At least as far as I can see it, there are a couple of areas involving market power and censorship that give me real concern,” Ferguson said.
Asked about allegations from liberal X users that the platform throttled their own views, Ferguson said that individual companies’ content moderation choices aren’t the problem. Antitrust concerns arise, he added, when companies promise users a certain speech-related practice in their terms of service but then restrict users because of their speech.
He also raised questions about advertisers colluding to boycott a certain platform — a nod to Elon Musk’s X — and collusion among platforms to decide what speech policies should be.
On the latter point, the FTC chair said one reason to be suspicious of collusion is when the story about former First Son Hunter Biden’s laptopbroke: “There seemed to be universal agreement across these platforms on what people could say.”
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Ferguson attempted to distance his chairmanship from his predecessor’s — saying he and former FTC chair Lina Khan speak “very rarely” — in response to some views that the two are operating similarly. He indicated he would ease up on the Biden administration’s strict stance on mergers but said he has no plan to let big tech firms off the hook.
Earlier this week, the FTC sued Uber, in a complaint that wouldn’t be out of place under Khan’s leadership, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman recently wrote. The FTC claimed deceptive billing and cancellation practices for the subscription service Uber One.
The FTC is also in the process of litigating a case that began during the first Trump administration against Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta had lobbied the government in an attempt to settle the lawsuit ahead of a trial — its $450 million settlement offer fell short of the FTC’s $30 billion ask.
While Trump could still step in and ask the FTC to settle, Ferguson said, “We have a good case … and the fact we’re in the second week of the trial sort of speaks for itself.”