The Trump Administration’s CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) expansion has virtually ceased China’s investments in Silicon Valley after concerns that Beijing’s state actors are plotting to steal intellectual property and buy out American firms. And CFIUS worked: Chinese money in US technology sunk nearly 95% in just two years, from $55.3 billion in 2016 to only $3 billion in 2018.

Their money is gone, but the ideology? Unfortunately not, as Silicon Valley has recently rolled out censorship policies and methods that resemble China’s Great Firewall.

Various conservative platforms and speakers, such as Infowars, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos, are now banned by Facebook and Instagram for “spreading hate and falsehoods”. Thus, their free speech online is now greatly limited while extreme leftists, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, are untouched.

Next, Google has removed Google AdSense on many conservative sites, resulting in those sites losing the ability to share advertisements with viewers, and thus, losing revenue. In the 2016 election, the search engine was accused of putting conservative websites closer to the bottom of search results to limit their audience.

Finally, the most solid evidence of Google’s pro-censorship policies is its outright firing of James Damore for speaking out on diversity issues.

While the Trump Administration made the Chinese Communist Party’s tech investments virtually disappear, its censorship-style lives on among America’s big tech. The new challenge is: Can Trump continue to protect the First Amendment?

Round one was about China and its money; round two will be about America’s freedom of speech. The stakes of freedom will only get greater.