Donald Trump has picked Brendan Carr to serve as his next FCC chairman, selecting the senior Republican on the commission.
Carr’s choice had been expected. Trump nominated Carr to serve on the FCC in his first term.
Trump said in a statement, “Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy. He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.”
While Republican majorities traditionally usher in deregulation, and Carr has called for a “top-to-bottom review” of FCC regulations, he has been a frequent critic of private tech platforms.
For years, he has railed against social media for what he characterizes as efforts to stifle conservative voices, even though companies deny such systematic discrimination takes place. Carr authored a portion of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that is calling for moves that could impose new liability for social media giants in the way that they moderate their content.
More specifically, Carr wants the FCC to issue an order that limits the immunity platforms enjoy from Section 230, the provisions of a 1996 law that shield tech companies from lawsuits for third party content they host on their sites.
Carr wrote in Project 2025 that the FCC should take actions that would “appropriately limit the number of cases in which a platform can censor with the benefit of Section 230’s protections.”
Major internet companies are likely to challenge such an approach as a violation of the First Amendment. And in Project 2025, Carr acknowledged that other conservatives disagree, writing that there are those “who do not think that the FCC or Congress should act in a way that regulates the content-moderation decisions of private platforms. One of the main arguments that this group offers is that doing so would intrude— unlawfully in their view—on the First Amendment rights of corporations to exclude content from their private platforms.”
Carr also has criticized NBC for featuring Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live just days before the presidential election. The network gave equal time to Donald Trump the next day, but even after Trump’s victory, Carr continued to chide the network, and even encouraged other presidential candidates to file an equal time complaint.
Last week, Carr fired off a letter to Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, accusing them of silencing “Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Carr claimed that their work with NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news sites and provides services like brand safety and misinformation tracking for advertisers and others. Carr wrote that NewsGuard was “leveraging its partnerships with advertising agencies to effectively [censor] targeted outlets.”
But Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO and co-editor in chief of NewsGuard, said in a statement that Carr’s claims rely on false reports about the rating system from outlets like Newsmax, which received a low credibility score.
“Our work does not involve any censorship or blocking of speech at all,” Crovitz said. “Instead of blocking information, we provide users with apolitical reliability analysis. Instead of censorship, we provide users with more information — reliability ratings of news publishers based on apolitical criteria and a transparent journalistic process — so that each user can make informed decisions about which information to trust.”
In Project 2025, Carr also disagreed with Trump in another area: TikTok. The incoming FCC chairman called for a ban on social media platform on national security grounds. After initially trying to ban TikTok in his first term, Trump now opposes such a move.
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