The Federal Trade Commission today revealed a public query into supposed censorship online, stating it desires “to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”

“Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” stated FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by President Trump to lead the commission. “This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”

The FTC statement stated that “censorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal.” Tech platforms’ actions “may harm consumers, affect competition, may have resulted from a lack of competition, or may have been the product of anti-competitive conduct,” the FTC stated.

The Chamber of Progress, a lobby group representing tech companies, provided a news release entitled, “FTC Chair Rides MAGA ‘Tech Censorship’ Hobby Horse.”

“Republicans have spent nearly a decade campaigning against perceived social media ‘censorship’ by attempting to dismantle platforms’ ability to moderate content, despite well-established Supreme Court precedent,” the group stated. “Accusations of ‘tech censorship’ also ignore the fact that conservative publishers and commentators receive broader engagement than liberal voices.”

In 2015, the Supreme Court discovered that a Texas state law restricting big social networks business from moderating posts based upon a user’s “viewpoint” is not likely to stand up to First Amendment analysis. The Supreme Court bulk viewpoint stated the court “has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.”