In the early days of December, Joshua Aaron, the innovator behind the ICEBlock application, initiated a federal lawsuit claiming a violation of his First Amendment rights. This legal action came after the Department of Justice pressured Apple to remove his app from the App Store, an act Aaron contends is unconstitutional. By complying, Apple inadvertently set a precedent for silencing anti-ICE voices.

The year 2025 has been pivotal for American free speech, with setbacks reminiscent of bygone eras. The Trump administration’s aggressive stance against immigrants and civil liberties has seen attempts to deport activists and researchers for their political expressions, manipulate the Federal Communications Commission to silence undesirable broadcasts, and pursue multiple baseless lawsuits against journalists covering Trump. Many of these legal battles culminated in settlements that resembled coercive tactics.

The administration’s use of immigration restrictions, stringent regulations, civil lawsuits, and questionable prosecutions are traditional methods to stifle dissent. However, there has been a concerted effort to influence private platforms as well. With the finalized sale of TikTok to a group led by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, by the end of 2025, major social media outlets are under the sway of US billionaires aligned with Trump. This shift occurs as most Americans report social media as their primary news source, empowering the administration with a significant tool: content moderation, originally intended to protect online dialogue.

The Trump administration claimed, without substantiation, that ICEBlock endangered agents. Aaron’s lawsuit is the first of its kind following a wave of big tech companies blocking similar apps, including Eyes Up, which aimed to document past ICE activities. Tech giants like Apple and Google justified these removals by citing content policy breaches, even categorizing ICE agents as a protected group to eliminate apps like Red Dot and DeICER.

Daphne Keller, former associate general counsel at Google and now director of platform regulation at Stanford’s Program in Law, Science & Technology, commented, “Speaking with seasoned trust and safety experts, they were baffled by Apple’s policy of classifying law enforcement as a protected class. My interpretation is that the companies felt compelled to appease the government, perhaps due to pressure or perceived benefits, leading them to fabricate justifications for their actions.”

Platform content moderation is a notion only about as old as the relatively new social media and technology platforms themselves, but has generally been understood to be a balance between free expression and the need to protect vulnerable groups or populations. The inversion of this concept — using moderation to restrict speech to protect the state acting against vulnerable populations — is a disconcerting and relatively new phenomenon here in the United States, though one that has already become a modus operandi elsewhere.

One Carnegie Endowment paper published last year, focused on India and Thailand, detailed how governments in those countries had used the language and infrastructure of platforms’ content moderation and community standards systems to restrain criticism and push a message. India under Narendra Modi, for example, had imposed “national security” restrictions that were mostly levied against civil society, using a multipronged approach of legal, economic, and political pressure.

Sangeeta Mahapatra, a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and a coauthor of the paper, stressed that while researchers are loath to extrapolate findings too much to new contexts with their own complexities, it was clear the US government was walking the same path. “We have seen this game played so many times that by now there is a kind of predictability,” she said. “The wolves are right at the door. You realize how this is an everyday phenomenon. It’s not something that is episodic, these kinds of intrusions into your life and the starring role that a platform plays, not just as an enabler, but as a proactive enabler.”

Mahapatra stressed that, while a lot of the public framing — and indeed administration officials’ own gloating — was around the Justice Department or Homeland Security having forced or required the companies to take these apps down, the pressure was, at the time the decisions were made, purely rhetorical, and these companies have on occasion forcefully pushed back on perceived government strong-arming. A decade ago, Apple famously went on the legal and rhetorical offensive to block demands by the FBI to create software to override iPhone security as the agency attempted to unlock a phone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter.

Now, though, there’s what she called a “co-production of digital authoritarianism” in which the government doesn’t really have to do that much to expect some level of compliance. “When you see Apple taking down apps proactively, it’s not something that has started with Trump, it’s a pattern that we have been observing for quite some time now. We have seen it in South Asia especially, India especially, a very lucrative market.”

Keller noted that “there is a narrative from the Republican side right now about how they are free speech warriors who are really mad about how the Biden administration was censoring speech online.” Yet, “politicians on both sides have always tried to get platforms to take down content, and it’s always been to serve their interests or their policy preferences.” In that environment, it can be legitimately difficult to find out what’s the usual rhetoric and what crosses a First Amendment line.

But, as she pointed out, Trump et al. have not exactly been subtle; less than two weeks before taking office again, Trump said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Trump-friendly changes to his platforms’ content policies were “probably” a result of the incoming president’s threat to jail Zuckerberg. As the ICEBlock lawsuit lays out, not only did the administration lean on Apple to take down the app, high-level officials including Attorney General Pam Bondi, immigration coordinator Tom Homan, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went on to gloat about how they directly triggered the removal.

The ability of regular people to be alerted to ICE sightings and then film and distribute the results has been important not only in a broad narrative sense, but for concrete, practical applications like forming the basis of judicial interventions. In mid-October, US District Judge Sara Ellis ordered Customs and Border Protection agents under the command of Trump henchman and Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino to follow use of force guidelines and wear body cameras after TV and bystander footage showed agents violently clashing with protesters. These body-worn cameras were then the basis for the judge’s finding that Bovino and his agents were lying to her in their descriptions of their operations (including the finding that agents apparently used ChatGPT to write at least one use of force report).

With an administration that has proven itself ready, willing, and able to lie over and over to the public, the media, Congress, and the courts, the accounts and records produced and compiled by the community, reporters, and researchers seems to be the only reliable corpus of evidence about what the federal agencies are actually doing on the ground — the warrantless arrests, the excessive force, the profiling. Having platforms willing to outright block avenues for people to know about, observe, and archive the footage of these operations poses a concrete risk to the public’s ability to know what’s going on at all.

Mahapatra said she’d been working with local partners including journalists and civic organizations on “record-keeping, all the receipts, so that the digital trace, evidence, is not lost, and there is some accountability mechanism… if you don’t document, the narrative capture becomes more unclear, more enduring and long-term.”

This federal push to tank these tools can also be understood through the lens of the administration working to shut down a competitor in the narrative-building game. It’s no secret that under Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security fancies itself not only a law enforcement and security clearinghouse but very much a propaganda organ for the administration’s anti-immigration political project. DHS has been sending out its own photographers to help produce slick, movie trailer-like footage of its operations, runs trollish recruitment ads that emphasize the dog-whistle “western values” preoccupations of its leaders, and has shelled out over $200 million for ad campaigns, including to a firm tied to Noem herself.

Keller referenced a now-infamous nighttime Chicago raid where heavily armed agents, some in helicopters, laid siege to an apartment building in an operation that the administration used as fodder for a heavily produced video. “An idea is this is a media war, of who can get the most compelling footage for their side,” she said. “That’s what ICE was doing in that moment, and it’s what they’re trying to prevent the activists from doing by getting the apps down, to the extent that the apps are really about pulling people together and getting video and documenting what is going on.”

Social media moderation and bad-faith utilization of terms of service as weapons in the speech wars are a little more abstract than having political organizers detained, even with how ham-fisted the administration has ultimately been about it, but it’s arguably a much more wide-ranging and effective way of influencing and controlling what speech is available. Now that Trump and team have had a taste, and seen how apparently easy it is to get the companies to play ball, why wouldn’t they keep reaching?

The platforms might have been acting out of expediency, but now that they’ve opened Pandora’s box, it’s hard to tell what the administration might push for. If ICE personnel are now a protected class under Apple’s rules, does that mean that the company could enforce hate speech standards against those criticizing agents? If not, why not? “I would expect they didn’t really think through the implications of, are they really going to interpret policy that way in the future,” said Keller.