In recent news, President-Elect Donald Trump announced the chairman of the FCC during his presidency will be Republican Brendan Carr. Personally, I had no idea who Brendan Carr was when this was announced, but after some research, I am arguing that Brendan Carr will be a harmful chairman during his 4-year term as chairman of the FCC.

First, it is important to note that Carr is the author of the FCC chapter in Project 2025, the outline that Trump will be using during his next 4 years of presidency. Project 2025 outlines proposals attributed to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, emphasizing deregulation of telecommunications, reducing governmental oversight of tech industries, and prioritizing private sector interests over net neutrality and public accessibility. These policies could harm underserved communities by limiting affordable internet access and weakening consumer protections. Critics argue such measures prioritize corporate profits while undermining equitable digital infrastructure development and online freedom.

Particularly, Brendan Carr’s plans illustrated in Project 2025 will be harmful to queer youth. Carr “pledges to end the FCC’s promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts” by dismantling conservative censorship on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The “conservative censorship” Carr is referring to is also known as fact-checking. He plans to remove fact-checking from popular social media platforms in order to push misinformation.

This is a huge problem for children and adolescents who use social media because they may not have the media literacy skills to understand what is real and fake news. With a lack of fact-checkers on these sites, fake news and misinformation can and WILL spread at a rapid rate because there is a lack of education surrounding social media and misinformation in our country, especially in gullible (no offense, children) young children’s minds. 

Alongside harming children and adolescents by removing fact-checkers from social media, this plan also puts queer youth at risk, as they will be subjected to more misinformation which may cause greater mental health struggles and an increase in suicidal behavior (which we have already seen a 700% increase in crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth after Election Day 2024).

By Carr pledging “to end the FCC’s promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts,” he is directly impacting queer youth by removing their safety net of DEI on social media and other broadcast television.