Social Media Companies, Fearful of Foreign Clampdowns, Cozy up to Washington Regulators as Potential Allies
1.15.2025
Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last fall completely blocked X (formerly Twitter) from publishing in the country, after Elon Musk publicly refused to suspend some social media accounts the government there wanted shuttered.
After much public posturing, Musk eventually relented. The judge then lifted the ban and X is online again, serving the Portuguese language market there with news, comments, analysis and new user-generated content.
The Brazilian showdown — though it targeted X/Twitter — is now seen as evidence of an emerging existential threat to all social media providers, including the dozens of social media platforms and social media marketing agencies in New York from the well-established site Pinterest to Sprinklr and Saturn, newer firms that integrate AI into their platforms.
Experts are claiming that U.S. social media firms are seeking to influence the coming Trump administration in Washington in the hopes that a tech-and-government alignment here will be an example for other regulators overseas who may be contemplating severe actions like Brazil, or the European Union, which last year fined U.S. companies billions of dollars for anti-trust breaches through its strict digital services act.
In an announcement this week on Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg said that he wanted to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world . . . The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government.”
The international business press says this may be the only lobbying option for U.S. companies.
“The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States provided Meta [owner of Facebook] with a glorious opportunity to pivot from futile cooperation with the EU to confrontation and coercion. If Meta could get the U.S. government on its side in its battles with the EU and other jurisdictions, then it would maximize its chances of success,” the Financial Times, of London, reported on Monday.
But the U.S., though widely seen as a free speech haven, has itself clamped down on foreign social media providers for “national security concerns.”
The U.S. Supreme Court this coming Friday is hearing arguments about the constitutionality of the Congressional ban on China’s TikTok, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the bill’s author, former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.
