On February 20, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) initiated a public inquiry regarding whether any technology platforms, including social media, communications, and other internet service providers, have violated the law by censoring, banning, or otherwise penalizing platform users based on their speech, actions, or affiliations.
As part of the FTC’s inquiry, individuals and companies can submit comments regarding their experiences with platform-moderation decisions via Regulations.gov by May 21, 2025. The FTC is specifically encouraging people to discuss the circumstances under which platforms have denied them access to services, whether the platforms had content-moderation policies, whether users had the ability to challenge adverse actions taken by the platform against them, how adverse actions affected them, the motivations of the platforms, and whether the actions of the platforms affected competition or were made possible by a lack of competition. As of February 28, 2025, more than 1,000 individual comments had been received.
The FTC did not refer to any specific laws that may have been violated but wrote in a press release that it seeks to determine whether certain content-moderation practices constitute “potentially unfair or deceptive acts or practices, or potentially unfair methods of competition.” The FTC also wrote that the actions taken by tech platforms “may harm consumers, affect competition, result from a lack of competition, or be the product of anti-competitive behavior.”
In an interview with Edward Lawrence on Fox Business Originals, Andrew N. Ferguson, who became chairman of the FTC on January 20, 2025, said that the purpose of the inquiry was to “make sure what happened in 2020, where big businesses with a lot of economic power could use that economic power in all sorts of scary social and political ways like with censorship” does not happen again.
The FTC itself has no authority to modify existing law, but Ferguson suggested that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields online platforms from liability for user-generated content, may require legislative or judicial reassessment. “I think Section 230 was adopted in order to promote sort of like our young internet companies when they needed some protection. These young internet companies are now gargantuan giant companies and Section 230 I think is often used to mistreat ordinary Americans who want to participate on these platforms.”
Companies that wish to comment on the FTC’s inquiry can contact Robin Crauthers for assistance with strategy and drafting.