It was impossible to miss them during the swearing-in ceremony for President Donald Trump: The über-wealthy leaders of some of the world’s most prominent and important technology companies, clustered tightly together in the Capitol Rotunda. As Politico wrote, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pinchai garnered “primo placement on the inaugural seating chart.” Apple CEO Tim Cook also attended.
What’s to make of the president-proximate positioning of these men, some of whom control the most powerful online marketplaces of ideas, including X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? For many on the left, it didn’t play well. It offered ocular evidence feeding into Joe Biden’s farewell address narrative about “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country” and the need to “hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.” Yes, another existential threat to democracy.
Business Insider suggested the CEOs attended “to try to get in [Trump’s] good graces.” There’s no denying that’s a significant part of it. They are, after all, businesspeople who don’t want federal regulatory initiatives heaped upon them by Trump, especially when social media platforms already face a macking wave of lawsuits and a bevy of state legislative initiatives.
Trump is a businessperson too, of course, and as The New York Times put it, “the message was clear” that “Washington is open for business.” The story didn’t add that the Federal Trade Commission, under outgoing chair Lina Kahn, did its best to close down Washington for business and hamstring Zuckerberg’s Meta by refiling an antitrust lawsuit in August 2021.
When The Washington Post called Kahn “an outspoken critic of the tech giants,” it was pure understatement. Perhaps another clear take away from the ceremony’s seating arrangement is that Trump will reject—what my colleague Mark Jamison called—“the Biden administration’s ill-advised antitrust crusade against America’s leading tech companies” and instead strike “a more balanced course that lets customer choice foster invention and growth.”
Regardless, the swearing-in signaled to some prominent Democrats that the relationship between business and government will be far too chummy during the next four years. The Hill reported that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren posted this on––wait for it––Musk’s X platform: “Big Tech billionaires have a front row seat at Trump’s inauguration. They have even better seats than Trump’s own cabinet picks. That says it all.”
Actually, it doesn’t say it all. There’s another symbolic facet to their positioning––one largely ignored by the mainstream media. It’s about the First Amendment and Trump’s decrying “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression,” during his inaugural address.
Although Trump never said it aloud, this was an unsubtle reference to the Biden administration’s jawboning––verbal arm twisting––of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X to delete or otherwise obscure conservative-leaning perspectives about matters like COVID 19 mask mandates and vaccines and the 2020 presidential election. As I recently explained, “the Biden administration placed a bullseye on Facebook.” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan this month that it amounted to “ideological-based censorship,” where “these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse.” This echoes Zuckerberg’s assertion in an August 2024 letter to Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, that members of Biden’s team repeatedly pressured Facebook to “censor certain COVID-19 content,” among other items.
It is thus ironic that, during his farewell address, Biden said “the free press is crumbling” while failing to acknowledge his own administration’s efforts to squelch free speech. But Trump called out Biden on the latter point, announcing during his inaugural address that he’d “sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” The executive order (EO), called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” is mostly symbolic because the First Amendment already prohibits government censorship of private expression. Yet, it importantly hammers away at the Biden administration’s jawboning, asserting that:
the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.
The EO calls for the Attorney General to investigate and report on the Biden administration’s jawboning activities and to suggest “recommendations for appropriate remedial actions” based on the findings.
So—just maybe—another part of the tech leaders’ presence was signaling that Trump stands with them in protecting platform free expression for all viewpoints, not squelching views under the guise of buzzwords like misinformation and disinformation.
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