The Federal Trade Commission Should Not Be the Ideological Speech Police

On February 12, Chairman Andrew Ferguson of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent a letter to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook raising concerns that Apple News may be systematically suppressing conservative content in its curated news feed. The letter, prompted by a study alleging that Apple News excluded right-leaning outlets from its top stories throughout January 2026, suggests that such editorial choices could constitute a violation of the FTC Act if they are “inconsistent” with Apple’s terms of service or the “reasonable expectations of consumers.” On its face, the concern about ideological bias in news curation is understandable.

The mechanism through which the FTC is pursuing this concern, however, is antithetical to free speech and good governance. The FTC is leveraging administrative technicalities like terms of service compliance—in which Apple never mentions political neutrality—to effectively dictate how a company curates content.

First, this is not how policymaking should function in a constitutional republic. The FTC’s letter does not announce a formal investigation. It does not cite a statutory violation or a terms of service violation. Instead, it operates in the murky twilight of regulatory suggestion, intimating that Apple’s editorial decisions may run afoul of consumer protection law if they do not align with what the government considers a balanced ideological presentation.

Ferguson himself acknowledged that the FTC “is not the speech police” and lacks the authority to require Apple to curate news in any particular ideological direction. Yet the letter’s unmistakable implication is that Apple should change its behavior or face the prospect of enforcement action.

This kind of regulatory jawboning, where the government exerts pressure on private firms without the accountability of formal rulemaking or adjudication, is antithetical to the rule of law and the principles of limited government. The practice of leveraging administrative ambiguity to coerce private speech decisions has a long and dishonorable lineage that should give American policymakers pause.

The impulse to treat private media platforms as quasi-public utilities subject to government-dictated “fairness” standards is rooted in a tradition of media access theory that has far more in common with Marxist conceptions of state-controlled speech than with the American free-market tradition. 

In fact, it was the Reagan administration that chose to end the “Fairness Doctrine,” a law that required media platforms to “afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of public importance.” The rule was ended because the Supreme Court grew skeptical of its effect on the editorial freedom of platforms, and the Reagan administration was equally critical of the law’s requirements to host certain types of speech. Social media platforms are also not public utilities, but the state would now like to categorize them this way so they can force them to carry certain types of content.

Now some policymakers like Ferguson seek to “transform the First Amendment into a tool for social change to advance specific political ends or ideological objectives,” dispensing with both the editorial discretion rights and the private property rights of speech platforms. The FTC’s letter to Apple fits neatly within this tradition. Its operative logic is that if the state is dissatisfied with the editorial choices of a private actor, it can use the implicit threat of regulatory consequences to compel a preferred outcome.

Second, what makes this episode particularly striking is its stark contrast with recent rhetoric emanating from Congress. On February 4, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation: Part II,” during which members of Congress excoriated the European Union’s (EU) Digital Services Act for pressuring American technology companies to adopt restrictive content moderation policies. The committee presented internal documents demonstrating that platforms like TikTok had updated their global community guidelines primarily to achieve compliance with the DSA—a phenomenon known as the “Brussels effect,” whereby the EU’s aggressive regulatory posture effectively exports its speech standards to the rest of the world.

Members of Congress were rightly alarmed by this dynamic. Many argued, correctly, that American companies forced to comply with the most restrictive global standards lose the agility and freedom that have defined the U.S. tech sector as a global leader, and that the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act exist precisely to prevent government-mandated censorship of this kind.

Yet, scarcely a week later, we are watching a federal agency engage in the very behavior that Congress decried when practiced by Brussels. The irony is difficult to overstate. If the government should not compel private companies to host or remove speech against their will, that principle cannot be selectively applied. It cannot be wrong when the EU pressures platforms to suppress content that European bureaucrats find distasteful, but permissible when American regulators pressure platforms to amplify content that American officials prefer. Either private firms possess editorial discretion as a matter of right, or they do not. There is no principled middle ground that permits the government to weaponize terms-of-service compliance as a backdoor to content regulation.

This is not an abstract concern. The current administration has demonstrated a troubling willingness to engage in precisely this form of coercion across multiple domains. From FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s pressure campaign against broadcast stations carrying Jimmy Kimmel to the Department of Justice’s threats against apps that facilitate constitutionally protected speech, the pattern is consistent: government officials leverage their regulatory authority, or even the perception of it, to intimidate private actors into altering their speech-related decisions. That Carr immediately endorsed Ferguson’s letter, stating, “Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act,” only underscores how coordinated and normalized this approach has become.

The United States has long distinguished itself from authoritarian and collectivist regimes precisely because it refuses to permit the state to dictate the terms of public discourse. The First Amendment is a foundational commitment to the proposition that the marketplace of ideas functions best when it is free from government interference. When federal agencies begin treating private editorial decisions as potential consumer protection violations, they chill speech. They signal to every platform, publisher, and aggregator that their content choices will be scrutinized not for fraud or deception in any meaningful sense, but for whether they satisfy the ideological preferences of whoever happens to hold power.

If policymakers are genuinely concerned about ideological bias in news aggregation, the answer lies in market competition and consumer choice, not in regulatory threats dressed up as terms-of-service audits. Consumers who are dissatisfied with Apple News’s editorial choices are free to use any competing news aggregation services, many of which focus precisely on ideological balance. The proper response to a product one finds wanting is to choose a different product, not to summon the regulatory apparatus of the federal government.

The United States must resist the temptation to follow the EU down the path of government-directed speech. The Brussels effect is dangerous because it normalizes the idea that regulators should determine what speech is acceptable and how it should be presented. If we replicate that model domestically, we forfeit the principles that have made the American tech sector the envy of the free world. Administrative coercion through regulatory letter-writing campaigns is undignified, unprincipled, and unworthy of a government that purports to champion free expression.