Even though some of the biggest Silicon Valley venture capitalists are jumping on the Trump train, the Project 2025 that would apparently guide a second Trump term says that tech companies "prey on children, like drug dealers."
If you watched any of the Democratic National Convention this week, you may have seen a running prop joke where speakers would bring out an oversize book to represent Project 2025, which is believed to be the sneak preview of the Trump second-term agenda. The above image shows Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson doing his turn with the oversize book prop. “You ever seen a document that can kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?" Thompson joked, as seen below. “Here it is.”
Trump’s quest for a second term hopes to be bolstered by newfound support from the Silicon Valley broligarchs, most notably Elon Musk. Yet a new Chronicle analysis finds that Project 2025 is really quite anti-tech, and posits that tech billionaires supporting Trump are making a “high-stakes bet about which provocations he and his surrogates are serious about, and which ones are negotiable.”
Project 2025 is a 900-page document that is available online. And it starts unloading on tech companies — and tech executives — as early as Page 5.
“The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps,” the document says on that page. “Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smartphones. They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.”
Wait a minute… Did they just call out Elon Musk’s own Twitter? And even more offensively to Elon, did they call it “Twitter” instead of “X”? (Yes on both counts. But the copyright on the Project 2025 document says it was written in 2023, so this was after Musk bought Twitter, but may have been written before he renamed the platform X.)
Regardless, one of the tech’s industry's biggest concerns during the Trump administration, the Biden administration, and whatever comes next, is something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law shields tech companies from lawsuits over user-generated or third-party content. Project 2025 could weaponize that rule so it doesn't apply to any platforms that “censor protected speech.”
Project 2025 critics suspect that actually means removing Section 230 protections from platforms that don’t openly favor conservative speech.
Cornell University doctoral student Roxana Muenster wrote for the Brookings Institution last month that “The law, as it is set out in Project 2025, could protect a number of small social media platforms associated with the authors of the paper and the administration that they envision, such as Trump’s own Truth Social, the user base of which pales in comparison to Meta’s mega-platforms, and r/The_Donald, one of the most active self-moderated subcommunities on Reddit prior to being banned for disregarding platform policy.”
But the real glue that holds tech barons and Trump together may just be a common goal to see cryptocurrency get propped up, and to see the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that rob opportunities from white men born into wealth.
“Some of the billionaires probably believe that they can cut a deal with Trump,” Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation senior fellow Darrell M. West told the Chronicle. “We know Trump is very transactional in how he thinks about things. And if you have billionaires who are dumping millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, they probably think that will shield them from the type of regulation that even Trump might be willing to support.”
Image: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - AUGUST 21: Comedian and actor Kenan Thompson speaks about Project 2025 on stage during the third day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 21, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. Delegates, politicians, and Democratic Party supporters are in Chicago for the convention, concluding with current Vice President Kamala Harris accepting her party's presidential nomination. The DNC takes place from August 19-22. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
