Published July 2, 2026
On July 2, 2026, EEPC President Ryan T. Anderson and EPPC Fellows Rachel N. Morrison and Aaron Kheriaty submitted a public comment to the Federal Trade Commission on a petition by X Corp. to reconsider a consent decree that enabled government weaponization, viewpoint-based enforcement, censorship by proxy, and efforts to pressure platforms, advertisers, and other private actors to suppress lawful speech.
As the scholars wrote in their comment, “In recent years, Americans have witnessed the growth of what Dr. Kheriaty has called a censorship Leviathan: a machinery of public and private power designed not merely to remove discrete unlawful content, but to manage the boundaries of permissible thought and debate…. That approach is incompatible with a free society.”
The comment points to how Dr. Kheriaty was censored for COVID and public-health speech disfavored by the government and how EPPC President Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally was removed from Amazon because it challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on gender ideology.
The scholars urged the Commission to evaluate the petition “with those lessons in mind” and keep the consent decree from becoming “a standing mechanism for government influence over one of the nation’s most important forums for public debate.”
Drawing a contrast between the consent decree and the Commission’s recent efforts to target false and unsubstantiated claims about sex-rejecting procedures made to parents and children, the scholars explained, “Taking the petition seriously would not undermine legitimate consumer-protection efforts, including the Commission’s recent attention to deceptive claims related to sex-rejecting procedures. To the contrary, protecting consumers from deception and protecting citizens from censorship are complementary goods.”
The scholars concluded:
[W]e respectfully urge the Commission to evaluate X Corp.’s petition in light of these principles: government must not weaponize regulatory authority against disfavored viewpoints; agencies must remain within their lawful bounds; consent decrees must not become perpetual supervisory regimes; and the digital public square must remain open to citizens seeking the truth about the most important questions of our time. In this way, the FTC can help promote the common good and maintain a public square that allows citizens to speak the truth about human dignity and on issues impacting religious liberty, the family, life, medicine, and technology.
Rachel N. Morrison is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project, which advocates for an authentic understanding of the human person in the drafting, implementation, and rollback of government regulations.
