Project 2025, a plan to fix free speech?

As the Heritage Foundation initiative comes under intense scrutiny we look at their proposals on free speech and digital civil liberties

Photo by Ryan Heffernan.

Project 2025, a conservative road map to remake the administrative state, has been taking hits for several weeks. Democrats and the liberal media have been provoking panic attacks among their followers, insinuating a dark plan to overthrow democracy. “Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real,” said Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, although the entire document is publicly available online. (Page numbers below reference this document.)

The Trump campaign has also disowned Project 2025 with Trump stating “I don’t know what the hell it is” and “they’re seriously extreme”.

This week Project 2025 director Paul Dans announced he is stepping down. He says it was always part of the plan, others suggest he was pushed.

Project 2025 is highly conservative in some aspects. It proposes outlawing pornography and imprisoning those who produce it, cutting federal funding for abortion, and banning the abortion pill Mifepristone. Its foreign policy is hawkish, pushing for more defense spending. As Michael Tracy argues:

“Someone’s going to have to explain how massively increasing expenditures on what is sometimes derisively referred to as the “military-industrial complex” represents any sort of severe blow to the “Deep State,” as the trembling libs claim to fear, and as “anti-establishment” right-wingers claim to yearn for.”

Given the hype we thought we’d better take a look at Project 2025's digital civil liberties and free speech aspects.

Project 2025 pushes hard on free speech and limiting government censorship efforts, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) a key target:

“Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth.” p.155

and

“the Twitter Files has demonstrated that CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left. In any event, the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One." p.155

It was CISA that initiated the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project and the failed Disinformation Governance Board.

While I disagree this is the work of the Left (I see them more as a culturally libertine centrist/corporatist/elitist blob) the rest holds. Project 2025 proposes moving CISA to the Department of Transportation.

They have further reform plans for the CIA and the Intelligence Community (IC), noting that “in dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian disinformation,” the CIA was discredited, and the shocking extent of politicization among some former IC officials was revealed.”

And that:

“The IC should be prohibited from monitoring so-called domestic disinformation. Such activity can easily slip into suppression of an opposition party’s speech, is corrosive of First Amendment protections, and raises questions about impartiality when the IC chooses not to act.” p.216

And as for the FBI:

“The United States government and, by extension, the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech, whether in the public square, in print, or online.” p.550

“The FBI tasked agents with monitoring social media and flagging content they deemed to be “misinformation” or “disinformation” (not associated with any plausible criminal conspiracy to deprive anyone of any rights) for platforms to remove." p.546

And that as a result, a new administration should:

"prohibit the FBI from engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity. The FBI, along with the rest of the government, needs a hard reset on the appropriate scope of its legitimate activities.” p.550

In that sense, Project 2025 seems to have understood how “countering disinformation” was weaponized by the government for censorship. Where I differ is the degree to which this is a liberal versus conservative phenomenon. The censorship has been targeted more at conservatives, but huge swathes of it are non-partisan, particularly Covid-related content. The censors have also now come for some pro-Palestinian advocates.

Big Tech, Section 230, and Antitrust

Project 2025 is strongly critical of Big Tech. They believe the Federal Communications Commission (FCC):

“should promote freedom of speech” and that it "has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market. Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” p.847

They suggest that the National Telecommunications and Information Agency should “Immediately conduct a thorough review of federal policy regarding free speech online and provide policy solutions to address big tech’s censorship of speech.”

Their remedies are however mixed. On Antitrust they are open: 

“Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic” notions—“such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government.” p.870

but generally non-committal. The paper acknowledges that Big Tech has too much power, but doesn’t specifically advocate for breaking them up.

Regarding Section 230 Project 2025 however has many proposals. Section 230 provides platforms with immunity for content generated by their users, whilst still allowing platforms to curate content. Many liberals and conservatives want to get rid of 230. For liberals, it enables platforms to be too liberal with the content they allow. For conservatives, it is seen as allowing platforms to curate/censor content in a way unfavorable to them. 

Project 2025 proposes that the FCC should: 

“eliminate immunities that courts added to Section 230. The FCC should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.” p.847

The result of this would be that large platforms would be compelled to carry speech that doesn’t fit their mission. For some the platforms are so large that such compulsion is justified, for others like FIRE, Section 230 is an enabler of free speech, and compelling private businesses to carry speech would go against the First Amendment.

The document also notes this tension:

“There are some, including contributors to this chapter, who do not think that the FCC or Congress should act in a way that regulates the content-moderation decisions of private platforms.” p.850

More to my liking is the suggestion “to empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact checkers, if any.”

The solutions are mixed, but the critique of Big Tech I find favourable, including their proposal to "investigate, expose, and remediate any instances in which HHS [Department of Health & Human Services] violated people’s rights by colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during COVID."

China

On China, Project 2025 pulls no punches, recommending  banning “all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.”

“If you want to understand the danger posed by collaboration between Big Tech and the CCP, look no further than TikTok. The highly addictive video app, used by 80 million Americans every month and overwhelmingly popular among teenage girls, is in effect a tool of Chinese espionage.” p.12

That TikTok is a national security threat is not inconceivable - the Chinese government views Facebook and other Western applications in the same way. The question is what doors does any monitoring or banning open for the same treatment to be dished out to other ill-favoured platforms, whether foreign or domestic? There is nothing in the document in that regard.

CBDCs and Digital ID

Project 2025 aims to “prevent the institution of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). A CBDC would provide unprecedented surveillance and potential control of financial transactions without providing added benefits available through existing technologies.” p.741

Digital ID doesn’t get mentioned though vaccine passports make a brief appearance:

“every one of the overreaching policies during the pandemic—from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the state of emergency declared (and renewed) by the HHS Secretary.” p.451

Where does that leave us?

On the one hand, there are laudable plans to limit government powers to intervene in speech. Many liberals would agree with some of the positions. My concern is whether the Section 230 interventions put the government even more into the free speech mix and whether Project 2025 is countering one highly politicised administrative state with another. As there are good proposals on winding back other government overreach I’m more intrigued than concerned.

I do have concerns that some right-wing positions on free speech are more tactical than principled. Many on the right turned against free speech after October 7, and in Australia recently right-wing anti-lockdown, health freedom, and free speech advocates called for the deportation of musicians for making obscene jokes.

My evolving position is that Big Tech needs to be broken up to remove its symbiotic relationship with the State. In the current arrangement, Big Tech gets to keep their quasi-monopolies and the Government gets to wield the threat of antitrust to ensure compliance with censorship requests. That cosy relationship needs disrupting in a way that allows for hundreds or thousands of new players to emerge in an ecosystem the government can regulate, but not control. 

With research support from

Justin S.