Trump Is Running Interference For Elon Musk

The Trump administration recently stumbled into a surprising international fight over what the State Department describes as “free speech” on social media. The “speech” in question? Sexualized images of women and children that have been generated by Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot. After U.K. officials threatened to ban X for not stopping the proliferation of these deepfakes, Sarah B. Rogers, a senior Trump appointee at the State Department, responded that “nothing is off the table” as the Trump administration considers ways to ensure people retain the previously unknown right to digitally undress whoever they want whenever they want, including kids.

To date, Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok. California’s attorney general and regulators in the U.K. and in Canada have each opened investigations. Musk said last week that the platform would place some limits on the tool, but that will not put an end to the probes.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S. — despite real momentum both at home and abroad to crack down on social media platforms — the Trump administration has been running interference for Musk and other social media executives and working to shield them from even the most basic forms of regulation. Defending some of Grok AI’s most controversial behavior is just the latest example, but it is particularly notable that it is happening against the backdrop of a growing bipartisan effort in Congress to repeal Section 230 — the law that provides social media platforms with a potent legal shield in the U.S. by immunizing them for content posted on their platforms.

What has emerged is a striking disconnection between the Trump administration and both public and political sentiment concerning the influence and perils of social media.

Trump did not always take this approach. During his first term, the administration expressed serious skepticism about the merits of Section 230 immunity, and during the 2024 campaign, Trump himself endorsed the idea of significantly revising Section 230 in order to limit the scope of the platforms’ immunity, but some things have evidently changed since then. Among other things, Trump’s own social media platform has grown; Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected; and Silicon Valley titans cozied up to Trump after he returned to power. On his first day back in office, Trump issued an executive order claiming that “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms,” and directing federal officials to cease any further censorship.

The most dramatic intervention of the Trump administration, however, occurred in late December, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had barred five people from entering the country because they have publicly advocated for social media regulation and content moderation.

Rubio described the group in a statement as “radical activists” who were part of a “global censorship-industrial complex.” They included a former senior European Commission official who helped craft the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a law that targets social media manipulation and illicit content and that recently resulted in a $140 million fine for X.

Despite Rubio and the administration’s claims, the fine had nothing to do with regulating the content of anyone’s speech. It was imposed because Musk’s company allegedly violated the EU’s law by employing a deceptive design for its blue checkmark, by maintaining an insufficient ad repository and by failing to provide third-party researchers with access to the platform’s public data.

Under the circumstances, the implication is that the Trump administration will strongly oppose any foreign laws or regulatory actions that apply to American social media companies, even though foreign governments are well within their rights to regulate companies that operate within their borders and affect their own domestic elections. The Trump administration is effectively trying to internationalize Section 230 immunity.

The facts get more disturbing as you dig deeper.

Among the five people targeted by Rubio and the State Department was Imran Ahmed, a British legal permanent resident of the United States who lives in the Washington D.C. area with an American wife and child. He heads the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which produces research on “online hate and disinformation” and advocates for changes by the platforms and governments. According to Rogers, however, Ahmed was a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Ahmed’s group also has a long and very public history of tangling with Musk, who sued the nonprofit on claims that the trial court judge described as “unabashedly and vociferously about one thing” — targeting the organization for its speech.

After the announcement by the State Department, Ahmed quickly assembled a formidable legal team — including Roberta Kaplan, Norm Eisen and Chris Clark — and went to court. He filed a lawsuit alleging that the government was retaliating against him in violation of the First Amendment and quickly obtained an order preventing the government from deporting him while the case proceeds.

As it happens, I had lunch with Ahmed a few weeks before the Trump administration tried to throw him out of the country to hear some of his current thinking about the influence of social media and Section 230 reform. When we reconnected recently, he was understandably rattled by the Trump administration’s effort to separate him from his family but also emboldened. “I think it’s a validation of the effectiveness of our advocacy work and our research that it attracts so much negative attention from the world’s richest toddler,” he said.

“CCDH’s research has really been critical in shifting public, lawmaker and regulator understanding,” Ahmed told me, “away from blaming individual users and towards recognizing how platform design choices — particularly engagement-driven algorithms — can amplify and create harm at scale.”

The group’s work began by focusing on antisemitism online, but, Ahmed told me, “the point at which we truly became effective as an organization is when we expanded beyond our remit to look at antisemitism and hate and started to look at children’s harms in particular.” One report last year described how ChatGPT could be used to generate disturbing information for young people on a range of issues, including suicide and substance abuse.

These sorts of harms to young people have been central to legislators’ case for repealing Section 230. The bipartisan coalition of senators who recently released their bill — which would sunset the immunity provision over a two-year period — includes South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley and Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, among others. They have also cited evidence of child exploitation, child sexual abuse material, sextortion and illegal drug sales on social media platforms.

Meanwhile — even setting all of that aside, if you can — the case for Section 230 immunity has dramatically weakened over time. When the law was passed 30 years ago, the basic idea was that emerging social media companies were merely acting as conduits for users to express themselves, not acting as publishers or speakers themselves or exercising editorial control.

That premise now seems laughable, particularly for Musk and X.

Several major news outlets and academic institutions have conducted investigations into the curation and manipulation of content on X, and they have consistently produced evidence that Musk has used the X algorithm to boost his own posts, to promote Trump and to amplify right-wing content. Musk has converted X into a potent tool to advance his own political power and beliefs, and with Section 230 immunity, he has been able to do this without worrying about the things that credible media outlets have to worry about — things like accuracy, fairness or harms to the audience.

Tech companies have lobbied to maintain Section 230 immunity for years, but there are plenty of sensible ways to revise or repeal the provision. The bill recently introduced by Graham, Durbin and others cleverly does it by creating a two-year endpoint for Section 230 immunity that would effectively force the companies to work with Congress on a new legal framework in the interim. The legislative status quo would shift in favor of lawmakers and reform advocates.

Another set of proposals would maintain Section 230 immunity in some form but would make it contingent on the platforms meeting federal standards for things like transparency, neutrality, content moderation and third-party access to their data. In effect, the companies would no longer get a free ride; they would have to give the public something substantial in order to maintain their preferred legal status.

Ahmed told me his case and his advocacy will continue despite the effort to deport him, but the episode underscores the Trump administration’s inversion of free speech law and principles.

Ahmed’s offense was taking a political position in public. The Trump administration’s claim that they targeted him and others to prevent censorship and vindicate free speech is entirely backwards — just as it was when the administration tried to deport foreign students for speech that was disfavored by the Trump White House; when Attorney General Pam Bondi described criticism of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk as “hate speech” in the wake of his killing; when Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened ABC and its parent company Disney over comments made by the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel; and when the administration mounted a campaign against disfavored universities and law firms based on activity protected by the First Amendment.

To the contrary, the Trump administration’s effort to deport Ahmed — and its continuing efforts to defend Musk’s business interests both domestically and internationally — should be a wake-up call to anyone concerned about both free speech and the way people go about their daily lives online. The world’s richest man has closely aligned himself with the world’s most powerful government, and thus far, he seems to be getting what he paid for.

The question is how long this arrangement holds, and whether Congress eventually decides to reassert itself to align the law with the reality of social media today.

“The problem with these Silicon Valley elites is that they have this combination of grandiosity, narcissism and sociopathy that mean that they believe that no rules can ever apply to them,” Ahmed told me. “America has to prove that isn’t true.”