The following is a transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s keynote address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference. A transcript of Ferguson’s accompanying interview with University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner and the subsequent audience Q&A will be published separately next week.
Luigi Zingales
Please allow me to briefly introduce our speaker. Andrew Ferguson is Chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission since January, 2025. Prior to that he was an FTC Commissioner since March, 2024. Before that, he served as Virginia’s solicitor general, chief counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell, and as a Republican counsel on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He also practiced law at several Washington, D.C. law firms.
And then, our own Eric Posner is the Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. His research interest is very broad, but includes antitrust, constitutional law, and financial regulation. He’s also a prolific author, and his most recent book is How Antitrust Failed Workers. Between 2022 and 2023, Eric served as a counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust.
And now I turn it over to the speaker.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson
Good evening. Thank you for that kind introduction. I consider it an honor and a privilege to address such a distinguished group.
The purpose of this conference is to discuss whether increased market concentration negatively affects our marketplace of ideas.
There are two assumptions hidden within that objective. The first is that it assumes that the marketplace of ideas is something we value or ought to value. And the second is an assumption that increased market concentration could undermine that value, whatever it might be. If that weren’t a possibility, this would be a pretty short conference. In my comments this evening, I want to provide some brief reflections on each of those assumptions.
What value are we trying to preserve in promoting a marketplace of ideas? For Oliver Wendell Holmes, the answer to that question was simple: truth.
In one of his most famous dissents, Justice Holmes argued that the best test of the truth of an opinion is its widespread acceptance by individuals engaged in a free trade of ideas. Just as success in a competitive marketplace can demonstrate the utility of a product to consumers, so too a consensus forged by the free and open exchange of ideas is the best test of the truthfulness of that consensus.
But Justice Holmes did not end there. For him, the truth arrived at by a free trade of ideas is the only ground upon which an idea should find its expression in our law. In other words, the marketplace of ideas is valuable not only because it helps us to discern what is true, but also because it promotes a political order where consensus is forged by the exercise of public persuasion, rather than imposed by the exercise of public power, or by the collusion of actors wielding private power, or—as we’ve seen recently—the collusion of public and private power together.
Characteristic of Justice Holmes, this opinion was personal, pragmatic, and progressive.
Holmes had nearly died fighting for the United States in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. The great contestation of slavery ended with that war. But, as he put it, he realized that time has upset many fighting faiths. He believed that political consensus could and should be won not on the battlefield but in the free trade of ideas. For Holmes, to embrace persuasion over power stands at the very heart of our theory of the Constitution, obliging us to be eternally vigilant against attempts to restrain or limit the free exchange of ideas among citizens.
If Holmes is correct, freedom of speech—which makes the marketplace of ideas possible—is a value deeply woven into the very fabric of our constitutional order and our society. If market concentration negatively impacts our marketplace of ideas, it is because it limits rather than expands the free exchange of ideas among the citizenry.
Now, the marketplace of ideas is of course a metaphor, and as such it has its limitations. For one thing, the widespread adoption of an idea does not necessarily make it true. Nor is an idea’s limited adoption necessarily a bar to its truthfulness.
My own view is that there are objective truths in the law of nature discoverable by the application of human reason, and those ideas are true even if they are believed and advanced by a very small minority of the community. But history reveals that those truths are not always readily discoverable. And, even once discovered or revealed, what those truths portend for any particular community at any particular time or place is not always obvious. Reasonable minds can and do disagree about them. Within the boundaries of objective truth, then, there is much room for debate. And that is where the marketplace of ideas matters the most: both for discovering the truth as part of the process by which human beings apply their reason to nature, and for determining how to apply those truths prudently to the circumstances in which a political community finds itself.
When we speak positively about the necessity of a marketplace of ideas for an open, free, and democratic society, we’re not thinking about the market for PR men, Madison Avenue advertisers, and other paid purveyors of propaganda, which all too often includes members of the legacy press.
Rather, we are thinking about the free, open, and informed exchange of ideas among ordinary citizens motivated by a desire to seek the truth and serve the common good of their community. And not only that, we are also thinking about a truly public forum through which each citizen—not just society’s elites—have equal capacity to express their own opinions, to have them heard and responded to by others, and for the consensus emerging from that exchange to have a genuine effect on the public policy of the society in which the exchanges take place.
I’m thinking about the vice president providing a detailed response to a policy criticism by a random anon on X. I’m thinking about the fresh perspectives one finds among academics and journalists who no longer have to depend on institutional gatekeepers that have long abandoned their core principles to educate, to inform, and to challenge abuses of public power. I’m thinking about an X thread on foreign policy written by an informed citizen lacking any credentials from the elite gatekeeper institutions which actually can influence public debate among policymakers. I’m thinking about the dissident physician who takes to social media to challenge his colleagues’ consensus on a public health crisis and whom history proves to have been absolutely correct. I’m thinking about the capacity of the individual citizen to amplify—through sharing or reposting on online platforms—his or her own opinion, cause, or policy and to coordinate civic action to effectuate the realization of that policy into law.
These are all examples of how the digital revolution has opened new avenues for citizens to participate in the political and civic process.
Like any other, this revolution has its promises and its pitfalls, and we have to collectively decide how to balance the two. Yet, if the greatest promise of social media is that it facilitates a mass expansion of the capacity of the citizen to engage in a free and open exchange of ideas, its greatest pitfall will forever be the temptation of social media companies to short-circuit that marketplace by censoring and limiting opinions with which they or others, all too often the democrat party, don’t agree. And because they occupy a new sector of our economy, these platforms often benefit financially from a relatively lean set of laws and regulations governing the conduct of their businesses.
Social media companies and the free exchange of ideas they facilitate are therefore vulnerable to outside parties who seek to create—by censorship and control—a more favorable information environment to advance their own social or political agendas.
It should be obvious to everyone here that if the social media space is highly concentrated, with incumbents facing little to no competition from rivals, it will be easier for platforms to engage in censorship—whether on their own initiative, in collusion with each other, or at the behest of left-wing public officials, regulators, advertisers, or other DNC interest groups. In other words, increased concentration can negatively impact the marketplace of ideas because it facilitates a variety of censorious practices; and censorious practices—whether carried out by state actors, private aggregations of power, or a combination of the two—is inimical to the free expression that makes our marketplace of ideas possible.
While I think such practices do some symbolic harm to our political culture by undermining the value of free speech in society, they also constitute a deliberate abuse of a social media platform’s market power and a potential violation of our antitrust laws.
When social media companies practice censorship, they inflict harm not just on those users whose opinions are excluded altogether or limited in dissemination, but also on any user who is attracted to the platform because it facilitates a genuine marketplace of ideas. To be sure, antitrust law cares about the mistreatment of the speaker, but it is no less concerned with the injury inflicted on the user who wishes to ingest ideas on a platform. If part of the attractiveness of a social media platform is that it facilitates a genuine marketplace of ideas, a highly concentrated, less competitive market will make it easier for social media companies to degrade the quality of their product through censorship without facing any competitive consequences. If a social media platform can make its product less attractive through censorious practices, violations of its terms of service, or through excessive advertisements, and if it can do so without a proportionate loss in its customer base, there are strong reasons to suspect that it is not operating in a competitive environment to the detriment of its users, which could be a violation of the antitrust or consumer protection laws, depending of course on the facts.
For this reason, the Federal Trade Commission recently requested public comment on the experience of users whose access to social media platforms has been denied, demonetized, or limited due to the contents of their post, their affiliations, or, most terrifyingly, conduct that took place off the platform.
To my mind, the best way to preserve some of the promise of social media as a digital marketplace of ideas is to acknowledge that the quality of its product depends in part on its commitment to free speech to its users. Consumers and content creators want a platform committed to free and open exchange of ideas. If they wanted left-wing apparatchiks to curate or inspect their ideas prior to public dissemination, they would content themselves to sit in a think tank lecture or inside a university classroom. (Or they could read The Atlantic.)
Of course, not all consumers or producers of ideas on social media are seeking the truth by engaging in diverse ideas and clickbaits. Users have diverse interests on social media. Some are sating their curiosity with clickbait. Others might be doomscrolling. They might be trolling. Or they may be seeking consolation in the values of their own beliefs or prejudices.
In those cases, we are not faced with a consumer or producer of ideas who intends to engage in the free marketplace of ideas. But that doesn’t mean that the prospect of engaging in a free and open exchange of ideas is not part of what attracts even those users to a social media platform. You can’t doomscroll without an abundance of pessimistic perspectives. You can’t troll without there being individuals whose opinions you see fit to lampoon. And you can’t find consolation in the validation of your own beliefs without accepting that others do not share those beliefs as you do. Every user of social media, from the lowbrow meme makers to the self-anointed policers of misinformation, is invested in the preservation of free expression on social media.
Because users of social media prefer it as a form of free expression and, as such, a facilitator of a marketplace of ideas, high concentration in the social media space leading to censorious practices poses an identifiable harm to consumer welfare.
While we cannot always assume that consumer welfare will dovetail with the preservation of important constitutional values like the freedom of speech, it is a fortunate coincidence for an individual like me who is committed to freedom of speech as I am that the vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws can promote this important social and constitutional value.
I have emphasized tonight the dangers of censorship in a highly concentrated media market. I have not spoken about the dangers of quote, “misinformation,” end quote. This is not only because I categorically dismiss elite and democrat hysteria over misinformation altogether, but also because I believe that a highly concentrated social media space generates far more opportunities for elite and left-wing manipulation than it does for populist so-called misinformation. One prominent left-wing scholar once described “manipulation” as the exercise of power in secret, unknown to those who are influenced and lacking any kind of public legitimation. As Missouri against Murthy revealed, when a society combines high concentration with opacity surrounding content moderation decisions that control the dissemination of information on social media, you have a recipe for elite “manipulation” of the public under the guise of combating “misinformation.”
Fortunately, the solution to manipulation and misinformation in the social media space is the same: to ensure that social media platforms meet consumer demand for a product that protects freedom of speech, thereby facilitating a genuine marketplace of ideas through which we might test the truth of our own claims, as well as those of our fellow citizens.
Thank you, and I look forward to our discussion.
[applause]
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
