Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - How The Govt Uses Big Tech to Silence Critics

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

The Trump admin publicly bragged about demanding that Apple and Facebook remove ICE watch apps and Facebook groups documenting ICE activity, and Big Tech is complying.Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz   🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co   [FREE SPEECH FRIDAY]Since last year, Meta, Apple, and other big tech platforms have been mass removing content related to ICE. From deleting Facebook groups who criticize ICE agents to removing apps from the app store that allow citizens to report ICE in their neighborhood, it's becoming harder to criticize ICE online. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is suing the government in order to get these Facebook groups and apps restored. Colin McDonnell, an attorney at FIRE joins me to break down these seminal lawsuits, how they're taking on the government, and why it's so crucial to protect free expression online. We discuss how DOJ and DHS officials, including Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, successfully pressured Apple and Facebook to remove an ICE-tracking app and a Chicago-based Facebook group with nearly 100,000 members. Colin breaks down why FIRE is suing the government , whether recording law enforcement in public is protected speech or dangerous "doxing" , and the chilling rumors of a secret ICE protester databaseFollow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz     https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0    https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social https://twitter.com/taylorlorenz

You should be really concerned when the government is telling you what you can say or see or hear about the government. Last fall, a major Facebook group documenting ICE activity in Chicago suddenly vanished. Around the same time, an app that allowed people to upload videos of ICE agents engaged in their activities disappeared from the app store. Both of these removals are part of a massive government crackdown on online speech, criticizing and documenting ICE. The foundation for individual rights and expression, also known as fire, has been fighting back against these government censorship efforts.

They're representing two of the victims in a major legal case against the government. Colin McDonnell is the attorney at fire on the case, and today he's joining me to explain how these Facebook groups and apps are being wiped from the web when government involvement in content moderation crosses the line into censorship and how the outcome of this case could redefine how far the government can go in influencing what speech stays online and what gets deleted.

Colin, welcome. Thanks for having me, Taylor. So to start off, I kind of want to situate people and bring them back to last year when I think a lot of this sort of ICE protest stuff started to happen. What was going on last year when these cases start? Where were your clients a year ago? And what were they doing? So one of our clients, Kay Rosado, she's a resident of Chicago.

And shortly after Trump's inauguration last year, you know, his administration was talking about how Chicago as a sanctuary city was going to be one of the first targets for increased immigration enforcement. And people in Chicago were freaked out. They didn't know how this was going to, you know, affect their city, affect daily life. And Kay is a small business owner. She sells jewelry. And she and other vendors would, like, put up booths at community. events. So these were outside in public. And even in that first week, they noticed that people were

afraid to go outside. There were fewer people at their events. And so what she wanted to do, and this was initially just for fellow small business owners and some friends and family, create a Facebook page where people could share information about what they were seeing ice doing out in public, including photos and videos or locations where they spotted ice so that they could plan around that. And particularly as time went on, and there were reports of ICE having violent encounters with people or even, you know, even citizens getting detained or injured because of their proximity to an ice raid. More and more people use this as a resource to stay informed about what, you know, their government was doing in their city. Yeah, it's so

interesting that this is happening in Chicago. Back in 2017, I covered Facebook's first ever communities summit. This is right when they were really, they had launched Facebook groups, but they were sort of relaunching Facebook groups. And they were really encouraging people. I think because 2017 by then, a lot of like local news had been decimated by the internet. But at that community summit, they were encouraging people to share local news and share information, share what's around them. They were telling people, they had brought actually hundreds of of Facebook group admins into Chicago from around the country. And a lot of those people were people that kind of run a, like, de facto local news groups.

And it's interesting because I feel like a lot of those, I mean, Kay sounds kind of similar to a lot of these other people, although she started it maybe specifically for the ICE reasons. But there are so many local news groups on Facebook that in the wake of all of this immigration stuff seem to have been pivoting towards talking about ICE. And it seems like this is kind of what Facebook was designed for. Right. I mean, this was just people in her community exchanging information, exchanging sometimes their points of view about what they were seeing or reading in the news. And again, it started small, but fast forward to the fall when the government announces Operation Midway Blitz, this enforcement surge in Chicago, her small group just exploded. It reached nearly 100,000 members.

And this was a public group, so anybody could join. All sorts of people were using it to share information. There were tens of thousands of posts and comments. I feel like, you know, last summer and into the fall, is really when we started to see these Ice Watch groups like explode, we start to see social media, you know, become kind of overrun with a lot of these videos of ICE agents, like hurting people or doing other things.

Yeah, people all over the country. were creating different tools or websites or social media groups to share information about ICE in their community. And it actually works here really well to talk about our other client because he works into the story. So he created an app that allowed people across the country to upload and view videos of ICE enforcement activity. And his idea was that people were posting these videos on social media, but

he was seeing that, you know, social media companies can take that content down. And so he wanted to create a way that would preserve these videos for the long term, you know, for so people could stay informed. And if there were court cases or other efforts to hold law enforcement accountable for what, you know, potential misconduct that some of these videos capture, that they would be securely stored there. So that's what he was doing. And starting in early summer, of last year, these sorts of apps and groups start to come to the attention of federal officials. So in June, CNN does a story on another app called Ice Block, and the administration officials, including Attorney General Bondi and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Nome,

start threatening virtually anyone affiliated with this sort of ICE-related speech that they didn't like with criminal prosecution. So they threaten not only to prosecute the developer of that ICE Block app, but even threatened to prosecute CNN just for reporting on the app. So they're issuing these threats right and left, and it all comes to a head in the fall, when DOJ officials reach out to Apple demanding that they take down these ICE-related apps, these apps reporting on public information about what ICE is doing. And Apple immediately complies. They take down our clients' Eyes Up app.

They take down the ICE Block app, and they take down several related apps. And when I say demand, I'm quoting Attorney General Bondi. She makes this public in a statement to Fox News. She said, we demanded that Apple take this down and Apple complied. It's a really blatant instance of censorship because this sort of pressuring of social media or tech companies to take down speech that government officials don't like. It surely happens a lot more than we're aware of because it doesn't happen in public view. But here you have federal officials publicly bragging about having demanded that these companies take down speech and that the companies, you know, basically, you know, immediately submitted. So it's, you know, it's just pretty blatant.

And so that happens with these apps, including the Eyes Up app. Within a few weeks, it happens to our other clients, Chicago-based Facebook group. Again, Bondi and Nome, they post on social media that they had contacted Facebook and that Facebook about the group and that Facebook immediately took it down. So the evidence of this government censorship is out there in plain view. It's so shocking, I have to say. I've reported for so long my whole career as a tech reporter of the way that these platforms can remove speech, is their right, obviously, to moderate, you know, content as they see fit. But you never see, I mean, you might find evidence of government pressure. You might, especially under the Biden

administration, I wrote about kind of like some of the pressures that they had put on these platforms, but it was so overt. I'm interested to know, I mean, did companies like Apple or Facebook or whatever do anything to fight back at all? Or did they immediately comply? I mean, did they reach out to this app developer or, you know, the woman who goes to the Facebook group and let her know, give her any chance to appeal, or was it just immediate overnight ban? No. Our clients got no prior notice and that both companies immediately complied, at least within, based on the evidence we have within a day of receiving outreach from the government.

Yeah, so it was pretty immediate. How did you guys get involved? Both of our client stories when their, you know, app and group were taken down, made head And so we read about it in the news first, and we found it alarming for a couple reasons. The first is that this sort of speech that they're engaged in, sharing information about what our government is doing, that speech that's core to the First Amendment's protections, and essential for our form of democratic government, you know, to be informed, to hold our government accountable, we need to be able to talk freely about what the government's doing. And that includes

what the public employees who work for us, what they're doing when they're carrying out their public functions. So the fact that the government was targeting this sort of speech was very concerning to us. And I want to make clear, the lawsuit that we brought, it's not about immigration policy. It's not even about clients in any case have certain viewpoints that they want to express, but for us what's important is that they have the right to speak, like the First Amendment says they should. And this is really something that no matter what your politics are or how you feel about ICE or immigration policy, you should be really concerned when the government is telling you what you can say or see or hear about the government.

Because, for example, with these, as we've seen in Minneapolis, and, you know, in other cities, these citizen videos of violent encounters with law enforcement, kind of no matter what your view is of a particular incident, surely you should be able to make up your own mind based on the video evidence and not just have the government tell you which videos you can see. because then you're only seeing what the government wants you to see that fits its narrative. So to recap, we wanted to get involved, first of all, because this is a core First Amendment right that's under attack. And the second reason you alluded to this earlier is that it was the way the government went about doing it. They were trying to suppress speech by coercing third-party companies to censor speech for them. and it's a problem that is not, you know, we saw it in the Biden administration. We're seeing it right now with this administration. The First Amendment prohibits that.

It's sometimes called job-boning. Basically, the First Amendment principle is if the government isn't allowed to censor speech directly under the First Amendment, it can't force other companies to do it for them. Like you said, if Apple or Facebook or other social media companies want to moderate content, based on their own policies and their own independent judgment, free of government interference, they have a First Amendment right to make those sorts of editorial decisions. But when the government gets involved and starts dictating to them which decisions they have to make, that becomes government censorship.

What about people that say, well, these groups were doxing people? I feel like you increasingly see this, especially from the right online of like this idea of doxing agents. and it's putting them in danger. And this is like dangerous, potentially, you know, inciting violence. I think that's the reason that META has given for taking down a bunch of these ice pages is that they are inciting violence or causing danger to these federal officers. What is your response to that? Yeah, it's really concerning that the government is throwing around these terms

and really seeming loose expanded definitions of them to justify censoring speech and kind of regardless of whether that's anything close. to what's going on. So let's talk about doxing. So the government officials, Christy Nome has said at different points, essentially that even sharing videos of ICE agents doing their jobs out in public is doxing. I don't think there's one uniform definition that everybody agrees on as to what doxing is, but that almost certainly does not qualify as doxing. One important point to consider here is that no matter how you define doxing, there's not a first amendment exception for it. So the government can't just say that's doxing. We get to censor it. You have to

point to an actual exception to the First Amendment, like incitement to violence or true threats or one of those narrow exceptions. So on the law, and they're wrong, on the definition of doxing, I think they're wrong. But it's also just as a factual matter, not what was going on here. The Eyes Up app was just sharing videos of what ICE was doing in public, what people could go and see with their own eyes. The Facebook group was focused on sharing information about what ICE was doing and where they were doing it. That's, I don't think, fits under anyone's definition of doxing.

No, doxing, I think, like, I mean, the most commonly agreed upon definition of it is just revealing extremely private information. So that would be like a personal address, your social security number, like, pretty, I don't know, things that are like very nonpublic, even actually. address now is like up for debate because people's addresses are so public and the houses of public officials are public. And so, yeah, recording somebody out in public is certainly not doxing at all, especially when they're on the job doing the, you know, doing the government's work. Right. So doxing just doesn't come close to justifying censorship here. Incitement to violence is another thing

we've heard thrown around to try to censor this sort of speech. And again, again, Again, wrong on the law, wrong on the facts. On the law to qualify as incitement to violence, it has to be speech that is both intended to and likely to cause violent, and not just any violence, but imminent violence. So, again, it's just posting videos of what law enforcement officers are doing in public or sharing information about, you know, what officers are doing or where they're doing it. It just doesn't come close to satisfying that. It's similar to, you know, if you, when you're driving, if you use Google Maps or Ways, it'll allow you to share information with other drivers about a speed trap or where you see an officer, you know, off the highway or allows you to see that information that other people are reporting. Now, people can do lawful things with that information or they, you know, theoretically could use that information to go do something unlawful. And if somebody does that, if they use that information to go, you know, assault a law enforcement officer, that's illegal, that person can and should be prosecuted.

But under the First Amendment, just the possibility that somebody else could do something illegal with public information doesn't make the source of that information not protected or criminal. There's some posts online I've seen where people say, well, the First Amendment says literally nothing about recording. law enforcement. It says that you can peacefully assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. That does not mean that you're allowed to harass ICE and, you know, and record them. Which is funny. Obviously, that technology didn't even exist. But we do have the right to record them. Do we not? Oh, we do. I mean, courts have been very clear and consistent that recording videos of, and specifically of law enforcement officers carrying out their duties. in public is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Yes, there is the text of the First Amendment, but then kind of what that means, the freedom of speech has been fleshed out in more detail in court decisions, and it doesn't just protect spoken or written words. It protects other forms of expression, including video. And when you record video, the courts have held, you are creating speech. So it falls under the First Amendment's protections. And when you're recording videos of law enforcement officers engaged in their duties in public, you're not just producing any speech.

You're producing speech, again, about our government and what it's doing when it's working for us. So you're producing speech that's just at the heart of the First Amendment. What about people who say, well, this isn't blatantly illegal, but meta should remove these groups or, you know, these app stores should delete these apps because it's just negativity. It's dangerous. It's, you know, it's their right to do it. Like, forget the government for a minute.

Why shouldn't meta just delete all these ICE apps? Like, would you have a problem with that? Yeah, look, so Meta or Apple, they have the right to create their own policies and make their own judgment calls about what violates or doesn't violate their policies. We can debate what the optimal content moderation policies are, but they do have the right to make those decisions. What makes this a problem is that it's the government dictates. to them what to keep on and what to take off.

It's an entirely different thing because it's the government telling us what sort of information we can share on these widely used platforms where people do get together in groups and talk and share information and share videos and photos and share advice about, you know, what's going on with immigration enforcement and, you know, how people ought to to respond who have concerns about going out in public and potentially becoming, you know, collateral damage. as part of immigration enforcement. What effect has this had on the broader communities? I mean, obviously your clients are not the only ones engaged in this type of behavior. There's other apps. There's other Facebook groups, et cetera. Do you have any insight from your clients or from otherwise in terms of how these actions from the governments have maybe had more wide-reaching effects than just your clients?

Well, certainly the concern is that we're here litigating and seeking court intervention on behalf of what's happened to our clients. But the concern is that when the government goes at, when they issue these threats of prosecution or when they mandate that tech companies shut down certain speech, it doesn't just affect the people specifically targeted, but it sends a broader message that if you're engaged in this sort of speech, whether you're a person starting a Facebook group

or whether you're a company like Facebook allowing these sorts of groups on your website, that you better watch out. that you're putting yourself at risk. So we certainly think that the chilling effect is much broader than the specific targeted apps and groups. And how have your clients been managing all of this? I mean, are they just essentially waiting for the court case to kind of work its way through to see if they'll have the right to reactivate their group or get their app back in the app store? Right, exactly.

I mean, they, you know, with Apple has an appeal process. And Mark went through that appeal process. tried to show them that he was not violating any of their policies. And here's the thing. Apple had approved his group just about five or six weeks earlier. It's not that anybody can just throw an app on the app store. You have to show Apple what it is. And he had some back and forth with Apple before he could get it up on the app store.

And Apple, they raised some unrelated issues that they worked out before it got up there. But Apple never raised the justification that they would later cite. It was a guideline that prevented you from posting discriminatory or mean-spirited content. Mean-spirited. What's mean-spirited? That's such a subjective term. It is. And if you look, you know, if you read the, this was guideline 1.1.1.

If you look at it, it's mostly talking about content that targets like protected classes on the basis of, you know, race or sex. or that sort of thing, or it says, or other groups. And apparently Apple decided that law enforcement was a protected group, that the most sense you can make out of it. But it's just Apple never raised that as an issue before until the day that the government told them to take it down. Well, it's interesting because you see that a lot, I feel like, with speech laws and with, I mean, just content moderation guidelines a lot.

I've written about how a lot of reproductive justice content is removed under sort of sexual content restrictions on these platforms. It seems like having these kind of vague guidelines basically just maybe gives the platform sort of carte blanche to implement them however they want. And increasingly, it seems like they are designating government entities or ICE agents or whatever as this like protected class. Yeah. And again, if they want to make that decision on their own free of government interference,

they can. It's just when they were exercising their own judgment, they didn't have a problem with the app. It's just as soon as the government tells them to take it off, then they say, oh, I guess we got to take it off and, you know, offer this pretextual reason that just really didn't hold up. Yeah. To me, the fact that they approved it in that way and didn't flag it under those guidelines just reveals the whole deal. Right. What else are you guys doing sort of in the meantime, you know, are there other kind of things that people can do that are following this case that want to help, you know, have these groups or apps for whatever exists in the world? Like, can they do anything?

or is it basically just like wait and see and hope that things work out in the courts? We're doing what we can to protect our client's rights, and we hope that the case will have, you know, kind of broader import and pushing back on these efforts altogether. But what I would encourage people to do is don't submit in advance. Don't let the government chill your speech. Keep speaking out. Keep doing what you're doing.

You know, keep sharing information about the government as you see fit. How do you sort of contextualize the case that you're working? on in this broader sort of censorship crusade, for lack of a better word, like, you know, that the government seems to be engaged in. It's definitely part of a broader pattern of these different methods of targeting disfavored speech, speech that the government doesn't like about the government or, you know, in this case, even we can just talk about ICE and immigration policy. So, you know, there have been some other lawsuits where the government has issued subpoenas. to try to unmask the identities of people with social media accounts that, you know, kind of similar to our clients, you know, talking about ICE. And when they're run anonymously, try to figure out who that was. There have been a few times where the recipient, the people who are sought to be unmasked, push back, they sued, and the government withdrew the subpoena.

So in that sense, they won. But, you know, again, the message the government's sending is, if you're in business, you're in terms of, in this kind of speech and you're talking about ICE in a way that we don't like, even if you try to speak anonymously, and you have a right to anonymous speech, it's sending a message that we're going to try to find out who you are, and there may be consequences. So yeah, there are other instances too. There's been some discussion lately about this potential list or database of ICE protesters. Now, I couldn't speak to the evidence one way or another as to the existence of this list, except, you know, there's a

There was, this was con on film, a woman who was engaged in her First Amendment rights recording ICE activity out in public, and an agent told her that, you know, we have a database of people like you. So there's a whole set of concerns if this list actually exists, but even the idea of this list is being used to try to scare people away from talking about ICE or recording what ICE is doing. And so that, you know, this is part of that broader pattern. And it's all very concerning.

It's all very concerning is a very good way to put, I think, everything that's happening right now. So what are you guys trying to accomplish with this lawsuit fundamentally? So what we're trying to get is a court order saying that Pam Bondi, Kristy, Gnone, DOJ, and DHS officials can't coerce Apple and Facebook into suppressing our client's speech. So basically, we're trying to get the government out of the picture like it was before and as it should be. But we hope that, you know, in addition to securing, you know, that specific legal relief for our clients, that the case will send a message that reaffirms that people have

the right to engage in this sort of speech about our government and that the government can't censor it whether it's direct or whether it's strong arming tech companies into doing it for them. I mean, I feel like even if you guys win, which hopefully you do and, you know, you sort of have this win against the government. Doesn't just the fact that this controversy exists also sort of freak Google and meta and these companies out? I mean, wouldn't it sort of incentivize them just the threat of potential government interference or maybe even getting on the bad side of the government? Like, wouldn't they want to kind of regulate speech more tightly just, again, to remain in the good favor of the government and not have to deal with any of this again?

Yeah. I mean, that's part of the problem here is that these companies, you know, we would hope that they would do more to stick up for the rights of their users. But in a sense, they're victims here too. Now, maybe not as sympathetic victims as the users who are losing their speech rights. But as we discuss, these companies have, they have their own First Amendment rights to moderate content as they see fit. And the government is forcing them to do it differently. So, yeah, I mean, it is a big problem that the government holds so many levers.

of power that can negatively affect these companies and really incentivizes them to submit to even unconstitutional government demands. And that's part of why it's so important to push back against this sort of indirect government censorship whenever we see it. Yeah, well, we're about to see a lot of it. I feel like with, I don't know, I've been reporting a lot on these child safety laws, which we see the way that they're, you know, being enacted in the states already. These companies are just saying, fine, you know, I don't, we don't require free speech. Like, meta doesn't require freedom of expression or recording ICE agents to profit. Like, it's almost more profitable for them to over-censor, it seems like,

because then they have this more friendly regulatory environment and they sort of are able to curry favor with the politicians. Yeah. No, it's, it's a bad set of incentives and we're, you know, we're doing everything we can to push back against it. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people continue to go to the work that you're doing? You should go to our website, firefI-R-E dot org, where you can find information about this case, our other cases, and the other First Amendment advocacy that we do. You guys are doing such great work. So thank you for joining me. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Taylor. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my

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