WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, an author of Project 2025, has called for gutting Section 230 protections.
Currently an FCC commissioner, Carr has been a vocal critic of Section 230. In the section of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint that lays out planned changes to FCC policies, Carr calls for “legislation that scraps Section 230’s current approach.”
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has governed internet speech since 1996. Known to digital rights activists as “the First Amendment of the internet,” it protects internet platforms that host and moderate user-generated content — including adult content — from being liable for that content.
Right-wing objections to Section 230 often focus on the claim that social media platforms use the rule as a shield allowing them to censor conservative speech. As president, Trump attempted to push through a repeal of Section 230 via a proposed amendment to an unrelated bill but was unsuccessful.
However, there have also been attacks on the rule from the left. During the 2020 presidential campaign, both Trump and Joe Biden repeatedly advocated for the repeal of Section 230. Former Democratic presidential candidate, Secretary of State, and First Lady Hillary Clinton has also called for a total repeal of Section 230.
Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” to which Carr was one of numerous contributors, notoriously includes a call to criminalize all adult content, asserting that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection.”
“Pornography should be outlawed,” the document states. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
Controversy over some Project 2025 policy positions initially led the Trump campaign to attempt to distance itself from the initiative. Trump himself claimed not to know the people running it, despite the fact that numerous former Trump administration staffers were involved.
However, Carr is not the first Project 2025 participant to be tapped for a role in the new Trump administration. Former ICE official Tom Holman, who is Trump's pick for “border czar,” and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Trump's nominee to head the CIA, were both also Project 2025 contributors.