Don't Cave To Euro Censorship Or Backdoor Demands, Uncle Sam Warns US Tech Firms

The head of America's consumer watchdog has issued a stark warning to some of the biggest names in the tech sphere – don't backdoor encryption or censor content at the behest of foreign governments, or there may be consequences.

On Thursday, Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson published the letter, sent to Akamai, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Discord, GoDaddy, Meta, Microsoft, Signal, Snap, Slack, and X, warning that complying with foreign governments' censorship demands or weakening encryption could violate US law.

"President Trump has put a swift end to the weaponization of the federal government against Americans and their freedoms, but foreign governments present emerging and ongoing threats to the free exchange of ideas," the letter reads [PDF].

"Companies might be censoring Americans in response to the laws, demands, or expected demands of foreign powers. And the anti-encryption policies of foreign governments might be causing companies to weaken data security measures and other technological means for Americans to vindicate their right to anonymous and private speech."

The move is the latest step in the Trump administration's war against the regulation of disinformation online and the apparent need for giving governments the right to view online communications. The US State Department fired a shot across Europe's bows earlier this month, reportedly ordering US diplomats in Europe to complain about the EU's Digital Services Act and how much it costs to enforce.

The EU is currently investigating X to determine if letting people buy blue ticks to promote their content breaches European law, drawing the ire of X's owner and one-time Trump friend Elon Musk. As for the UK, America's Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed the UK had backed down on demands for a backdoor to Apple's encrypted data after pressure from the second Trump administration.

"Because online platforms have become so critical to public discourse, pervasive online censorship in recent years has outraged the American people," Ferguson claimed.

"Not only have Americans been censored and expelled from platforms for uttering opinions and beliefs that were not shared by a small Silicon Valley elite, the previous administration actively worked to encourage such censorship."

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What's ironic is that for years, the US tried to claim the same powers the UK and EU now exercise. Trump's former Attorney General William Barr and the former FBI boss Christopher Wray both advocated backdooring encryption, although the NSA was less sanguine about the policy.

But since the second Trump administration came into power, America's position has changed somewhat. On his recent visit to the UK, veep JD Vance wasn't prepared to sit back about such matters, warning UK ministers that restricting people from saying what they want to online could have serious consequences.

The debate has pushed some unlikely bedfellows to team up. On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior speech and privacy activist Paige Collings argued that the UK's Online Safety Act was a major threat to privacy and was not making children safer, but was an excuse for government overreach.

Over in Westminster, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage pledged to repeal the Online Safety Act, a move that prompted Labour tech secretary Peter Kyle to say Farage was on the side of "extreme pornographers."

Ferguson, however, was firm on the issue in his Thursday missive.

"American consumers do not reasonably expect to be censored to appease a foreign power and may be deceived by such actions," he wrote.

"And as with weakened security measures, consumers might be further deceived if companies do not prominently disclose that censorious policies were adopted due to the actions of a foreign government, as consumers might not want to use a service that exposes them to censorship by foreign powers."

None of the companies named in the letter had any comment on the matter at time of publication. ®