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FCC Chairman Moves to Regulate Internet Sites and Social Media That Refuse to Amplify Trump Propaganda and Lies
On Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced the agency's plans to move forward on new rules to govern content moderation on social-media platforms and other websites that feature third-party content.
WASHINGTON
On Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced the agency's plans to move forward on new rules to govern content moderation on social-media platforms and other websites that feature third-party content.
The FCC move comes in response to a White House executive order from May that seeks to punish social-media companies for fact checking President Trump's online posts. Under the order, the FCC was prompted to craft a rule that would potentially take away from social-media companies protections granted in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that generally shields companies from legal liability for the material their users post online.
"The commission's general counsel has informed me that the FCC has the legal authority to interpret Sec. 230," Pai said in a statement announcing his intention to begin a rulemaking process on the matter.
In August, Free Press joined a lawsuit challenging Trump's executive order. The suit asserts that this unconstitutional order effectively encourages the spread of harmful disinformation about voting rights, racial-justice protests, COVID-19 treatment and other vital issues. In September, Free Press filed FCC comments opposing the kind of move Pai seems bent on making with today's announcement.
Free Press Senior Policy Counsel Gaurav Laroia made the following statement:
"With this announcement, the Pai Doctrine gets clearer and clearer. He declares himself a champion of the First Amendment and claims he doesn't want heavy-handed internet regulation -- then pushes policies that stifle free expression online. In this case, the Pai Doctrine would expose websites to liability if they remove any of President Trump's lies or provide any context to such disinformation.
"The FCC has no authority to issue binding pronouncements on Section 230. Its effort to make the platforms liable for their editorializing or content takedowns makes no sense. No one, from Trump on down, has the right to be carried on Facebook, Twitter or any other website -- and those websites have a First Amendment right to disassociate themselves from speech they disapprove of. And without underlying unlawfulness there's nothing for Trump or anyone else to sue over if Twitter takes down a post.
"The real goal of the Trump FCC here is to engage in political retaliation against protected speech and editorializing. Surely President Trump and Chairman Pai can't suggest that Twitter should be liable for carrying the president's lies. The intent instead is to force platforms to carry these lies, and open them up to lawsuits for everything else their users post if the platforms dare to refuse this kind of presidential commandeering.
"The FCC is proposing nothing less than a Fairness Doctrine for Facebook, and a must-carry regime for fraudsters, propagandists, bigots, charlatans and those in power who inspire, provoke and promote them.
"It's no coincidence that this charade is happening during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election. The Trump administration and its FCC allies are trying to bully and intimidate social-media companies into rolling back their content-moderation efforts for election-related disinformation.
"This FCC proceeding is a hypocritical and cynical enterprise that threatens online diversity, our fundamental freedoms and the rule of law."
Free Press was created to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media. We believe that positive social change, racial justice and meaningful engagement in public life require equitable access to technology, diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, and journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what's actually happening in their communities.
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‘Ruthlessly Corrupt’: Democrats Take Aim at Trump's ‘Plunder’ of US Taxpayers in New Bill
Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the bill would stop Trump from "trying to snatch up billions of taxpayer dollars to line his own pockets and settle personal scores."
Apr 15, 2026
Four Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday unveiled legislation aimed at ending what they described as President Donald Trump's "plunder" of US taxpayers.
The Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act—cosponsored by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Dave Min (D-Calif.)—was crafted in response to Trump's effort to get the federal Internal Revenue Service to hand him a $10 billion settlement for the 2020 leak of his tax records and his demand that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) pay him $230 million over its past criminal investigations of him.
Among other things, the bill would bar both the president and the vice president, as well as their immediate family members, from collecting settlement payments from the federal government while in office.
The proposed legislation would also prohibit both the president and the vice president from filing administrative claims for damages while in office, and would only allow presidents and vice presidents to "collect compensatory damages awarded by a federal court if the court appoints an independent counsel to represent the agency and makes all proceedings public."
The bill allows former presidents and vice presidents to collect damages from the federal government, but only if the agency being sued "appoints career expert staff to lead the agency’s review or adjudication of any administrative claim brought by the former president/VP, and no official appointed by any president/VP is involved in handling the claim."
Additionally, any settlement made to a former president or vice president must be made public within seven days.
Warren said that the legislation was necessary to stop Trump from "trying to snatch up billions of taxpayer dollars to line his own pockets and settle personal scores."
Raskin accused Trump of exploiting the power of his office to "loot billions of dollars from American taxpayers," an operation that he described as the "ongoing scandal of this ruthlessly corrupt administration."
"The ‘Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act’ will prevent the president from pursuing the emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds," Raskin added, "and then settling the suit as ‘defendant’ for big bucks, a collusive settlement scam they recently executed with the disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who waltzed off with more than a million dollars for a bogus claim already dismissed by a federal court."
Flynn settled with the DOJ last month in a case in which he accused the government of "improperly and politically" targeting him, after he was charged with making false statements to the FBI in 2017.
The Democrats' bill has earned the endorsements of government watchdogs Democracy Defenders Action, Common Cause, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Debra Perlin, vice president of policy at CREW, praised the bill for establishing "common sense guardrails to protect against corrupt payouts to the president and the vice president during their terms in office and after they depart."
"Since returning to office, Donald Trump keeps finding troubling new ways to enrich himself at the taxpayers' expense," Perlin noted. "The president’s lawsuit against the IRS for $10 billion is emblematic of a pattern of self-dealing and corruption that appears pervasive in his administration."
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'Taxing Billionaires Is Not Radical': Mamdani Joins Top Economists to Denounce 'Rigged' US Tax System
While most Americans are paying more in taxes this year, the wealthiest 1% are saving an average of $9,000 thanks to Trump's tax legislation.
Apr 15, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using Tax Day to remind Americans that the nation's tax code is "rigged" to protect the superrich while making the case for a more equitable system.
In a Guardian op-ed co-written with Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz and Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, New York's democratic socialist mayor lamented that the world is living with greater wealth inequality than ever before, with just 0.0001% of the global population holding the equivalent of 16% of global wealth—more than the bottom half of humanity.
Mamdani and the economists attributed the global surge in inequality in large part to America's "regressive" tax system, which has grown dramatically more favorable to the wealthy over the past half-century.
As wealth concentrates, so does power — the power to influence elections, shape policy, tilt markets and define the terms of public debate.Taxing billionaires is not radical.What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship.
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— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) April 15, 2026 at 11:05 AM
Compared to 1960, when the 400 richest Americans paid roughly half their incomes in taxes, they now pay about 24%—helped by a combination of lower marginal tax rates and loopholes that allow billionaires and corporations to shield their wealth and effectively pay a smaller share of their incomes than everyone else.
This inequality was further exacerbated by the massive GOP tax law signed by President Donald Trump last year, which a report by Americans for Tax Fairness found gave the wealthiest 1% of households an average tax break of $9,000.
While the Trump administration promised earlier this year that the average American family would receive a $1,000 tax refund from the legislation, Corey Husak, director of tax policy at the Center for American Progress, found that the average refund was just $346 higher than the previous year—and that even that figure was heavily inflated by the benefits accrued by the richest earners.
Meanwhile, those gains were more than wiped out by the added cost of Trump's tariffs and the dramatic cuts to the social safety net passed by Republicans, which have led to spiking health insurance costs and thrown millions off Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
"We can disagree about how progressive tax systems should be—the extent to which the rich should pay more tax, relative to their income, than the rest of us," Mamdani, Stiglitz, and Zucman wrote. "But there is no justification for a regressive system in which the superrich contribute less than the rest of us. This is how inequality is deepened and sustained."
The authors praised efforts in other countries to combat rising inequality. One initiative they highlighted was a 2% tax on the wealth of those with more than €100 million ($117 million), a proposal championed by Zucman. A version of the measure was passed last year by France's National Assembly but stalled in the Senate after being blocked by centrist and right-wing parties.
But the initiative still has momentum around the world. This weekend, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will meet with the leaders of several other nations, including Mexico, Colombia, and South Africa, to discuss adopting similar taxes.
Meanwhile, in the US, a proposed ballot initiative for a one-time 5% billionaire tax in California—aimed at recouping losses from Trump's Medicaid cuts—appears overwhelmingly popular, with around two-thirds support according to a poll last month, despite aggressive lobbying by billionaires to stop the measure.
Mamdani has pushed for a similar measure in New York City to help balance the city budget and fund universal childcare and affordable housing.
On Wednesday, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that she was backing a so-called "pied-à-terre tax," which applies a surcharge to anyone with a second home valued over $5 million in New York City. Mamdani's office has estimated that it will raise $500 million annually.
In early 2026, consumer prices and housing costs have soared far faster than wages can match. A January poll from KFF found that 82% of adults said their overall cost of living had increased over the past year, with around two-thirds saying they worried about affording healthcare for themselves and their families, and nearly a quarter saying they were worried about affording food and rent.
In response to this economic precarity, more than 62% of Americans said in a January YouGov survey that they felt billionaires are taxed too little, and more than half said that wealth inequality is a problem.
"The idea that billionaires should pay higher tax rates than working people is not radical," the authors of the Guardian op-ed said. "What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship—and where those billionaires can in effect opt out of contributing to the society that made their success possible."
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Anti-Monopoly Dems Say Proposed Airline Megamerger 'Should Never See Light of Day'
The heads of the congressional Monopoly-Busters Caucus warned that a future administration could "break up" a merger of United and American Airlines if it is approved by Trump regulators.
Apr 15, 2026
The Democratic leaders of the congressional Monopoly-Busters Caucus said Wednesday that a recently floated megamerger of two of the largest airlines in the US—United and American—would be so awful for consumers that it shouldn't even be considered, let alone approved by federal regulators.
"The rumored scheme to merge United and American should never see the light of day," said Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Pat Ryan (D-NY), and Angie Craig (D-Minn.). "This disaster of a merger would be illegal, consolidating more than a third of the US airline market, eliminating direct competitors on hundreds of routes across the country, and creating a near-monopoly on flights in many cities."
The House Democrats went on to say that if a United-American merger is formally proposed and approved by President Donald Trump's regulators, a future Democratic administration could break up the resulting airline behemoth.
"In a time when too many Americans just struggle to even go on vacation, much less afford their housing, childcare, and healthcare, these airline executives should not mistake the corruption of this administration as a green light to break the law," the lawmakers said. "They should also remember that there is no statute of limitations on breaking up bad deals."
"In case it is not crystal clear," they added, "that is absolutely a threat to break up this merger should it ever happen."
The lawmakers' statement came a day after Bloomberg reported that United Airlines (UA) CEO Scott Kirby floated the idea of merging his company with American Airlines (AA) "directly" to Trump during a meeting in late February. Kirby also pitched the merger idea to other "senior government officials," the outlet noted, without providing names.
"A combination would create the largest airline on the planet," Bloomberg observed. "As a result, any merger between the two aviation giants would pose serious antitrust concerns and likely face significant backlash from consumers, politicians and rival US airlines."
"That the United CEO raised the idea of a merger with American directly with Donald Trump suggests he thinks he might obtain direct approval from the president for a merger that would otherwise never be permitted.”
Contrary to claims of a "surging MAGA antitrust movement" in the early days of Trump's second White House term, the president's administration has proven friendly to corporate merger efforts, from Paramount-Skydance to UnitedHealth-Amedisys and more. Reuters reported Wednesday that "investment banking fees—earned from advising on mergers and acquisitions and underwriting deals—surged an average of 27% across six major US banks in the first quarter, with record dealmaking a key profit driver."
William McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Wednesday that "thanks to the federal preemption clause in the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, states have virtually no airline oversight."
"So effectively the only sheriffs overseeing airlines are [the Department of Transportation] and [Department of Justice]," McGee observed. "Under Trump they've been derelict in policing competition."
"To be clear: A UA-AA merger is absurd," McGee added. "A monolith mega-mega-carrier operating 4 of every 10 domestic flights is so harmful that anyone favoring it doesn't understand airlines. Or is a regulator eager to please a president who 'loves to see big deals.'"
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement Tuesday that "it would be easy to dismiss the prospect of such a merger passing antitrust scrutiny—except that the Trump Department of Justice seems content to bless dangerously high levels of corporate concentration, so long as administration cronies, allies, or flatterers are in charge of corporate goliath."
"That the United CEO raised the idea of a merger with American directly with Donald Trump," Weissman added, "suggests he thinks he might obtain direct approval from the president for a merger that would otherwise never be permitted.”
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