Vice President JD Vance said big tech companies remain “very much on notice” to respect constitutional free speech rights despite the support shown for the new administration by Silicon Valley titans.
Vance told CBS’s “Face the Nation on Sunday that President Trump is prepared to act if tech giants continue practices conservatives perceive as censorship.
“We believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” Vance said.
“They can either respect Americans’ constitutional rights, stop engaging in censorship, or face the consequences under Donald Trump’s leadership.”
During the interview, Vance also clashed with “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan over Trump’s decision to halt a refugee program that barred hundreds of Afghans from reaching the US.
Despite big tech’s bear hug of Trump since the Nov. 5 election, the president and his supporters still harbor years-long grievances against social media platforms that are alleged to have an anti-conservative bias by moderating content in ways they view as suppressing free expression.
After leaving office in 2021, Trump accused Google of suppressing favorable news coverage about him.
He also criticized Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms for banning him from Facebook and Instagram following the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
Since Trump’s reelection in November, several tech CEOs have made overtures to the administration, attending his Mar-a-Lago events and contributing to his inaugural fund.
Notable attendees included Meta boss Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and X owner Musk, who has become one of Trump’s top advisers.
Zuckerberg, in particular, has sought to mend relations with the administration, reversing years of tension.
Earlier this month, the Meta chief announced that the company would end its third-party fact-checking program, a move praised by Trump.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, acknowledged that the company’s moderation systems had “gone too far,” leading to excessive restrictions on free expression.
Trump’s animosity toward tech platforms escalated during his first term.
In 2020, Twitter, now known as X, fact-checked and flagged Trump’s posts about mail-in voting and the George Floyd protests, leading him to accuse the platform of censorship.
Trump responded by signing an executive order attempting to limit social media companies’ liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
In October 2020, The Post published a report based on emails retrieved from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, raising concerns about potential corruption.
Major social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, limited the article’s distribution, citing misinformation concerns, which sparked debates over censorship and tech companies’ influence on political discourse.
Despite initial claims by intelligence chiefs that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation,” investigators later acknowledged that the emails were authentic.
After the Jan. 6, 2021 riots, Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts, citing posts they said incited violence.
Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account after acquiring the platform in 2022, while Meta restored Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in January 2023 following a two-year suspension.
