Since President Donald Trump appointed him as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr has deviated from his avowed commitment to the First Amendment in several notable ways. So it is surprising but encouraging to see Carr throw cold water on the notion that the government should try to suppress negative online comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination last week.
"I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech," Carr said at Politico's AI and Tech Summit on Tuesday. While the Court has said incitement to violence can be punished in certain circumstances, he noted, that's "a relatively small category of speech," and there are "existing laws on the books that deal with that."
Carr has previously suggested that the FCC might try to limit liability protection for social media platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But when Politico's Alex Burns asked him whether such interpretive regulation seems "more urgent" in light of Kirk's murder, Carr said his main concern is not excessive tolerance for inflammatory rhetoric but the opposite: heavy-handed content moderation, which he sees as a threat to freedom of speech.
