Trump's anti-censor drive ‘fuels misinformation crisis”

The UK is facing a crisis in the war against misinformation, which has been emboldened by Donald Trump’s scrapping of protections in the name of free speech, it has been warned.

- ALEX ROSS

Fact-checking charity Full Fact said the shift in US politics was having a “chaotic impact” on the information environment, with political shocks from Washington also presenting a direct challenge to Europe.

With the UK now facing an unprecedented volume of misinformation shared online, the charity is urgently calling on the Labour government to resist pressure from the US, and do more to protect the public.

On taking office for a second term in January, Mr Trump signed an executive order aimed at “restoring freedom of speech and ending censorship”, with the president taking aim at factchecking on social media platforms.

In a move Full Fact suspects to be an attempt to “curry political favour”, Meta abandoned its use of independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram in the US, replacing them with an X-style “community notes”. There are now fears it will be rolled out globally.

Then in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, delivered an explosive speech at the Munich Security Conference, accusing EU leaders of using “ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation” to hide “entrenched interest”, further heightening concerns, the charity said. And last month, the US National Science Foundation ended grants to researchers studying misinformation.

In its annual report for 2025, Full Fact said: “The beginning of President Trump’s second term has continued to have a chaotic impact on the information environment, and the dust is unlikely to settle soon.

“The early embrace of free speech absolutism and anticensorship rhetoric has focused even greater attention on antitrust hearings as leading tech executives rapidly try to embrace a new reality.