• by Wendy Davis , February 12, 2026

The head of the Federal Trade Commission this week claimed in a letter to Apple that the company may be violating the federal consumer protection law by allegedly promoting liberal publications in Apple News and suppressing right-wing ones.

"Any act or practice by Apple News to suppress or promote news articles based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication, if inconsistent with Apple’s terms of service or the reasonable expectations of consumers, may violate the FTC Act," Chair Andrew Ferguson says in a warning letter sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday.

Ferguson, who has repeatedly accused tech companies of censoring conservative voices, acknowledged in his letter that the agency lacks authority to control how private businesses curate news.

Nonetheless, he claims the FTC can investigate "material misrepresentations and omissions" regarding a "speech-related product."

His letter references Apple News's terms of service -- but those terms don't specify how the company decides which articles to feature.

Ferguson writes to Cook that "multiple studies" found that Apple News "has chosen not to feature a single article from an American conservative-leaning news source, while simultaneously promoting hundreds of articles from liberal publications."

Ferguson's letter cites reports by the conservative Media Research Center, which says its mission includes combatting "anti-Americanism from Silicon Valley-related entities."

That organization describes Vox, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vice as "radically leftist," and calls The New York Times "leftist."

Last month, the group reported that Apple News published 440 stories from supposedly "left-leaning outlets," such as The Washington Post, The Associated Press and NBC News.

The FTC chief -- whose agency is currently facing two lawsuits accusing it of violating the First Amendment -- says in the letter: "As an American citizen, I abhor and condemn any attempt to censor content for ideological reasons."

Last week, NewsGuard alleged in a lawsuit that the FTC unconstitutionally prohibited Omnicom from contracting with news ratings services as a condition of its merger with Interpublic Group. The watchdog Media Matters for America has also taken the agency to court over a demand to turn over information relating to reports about ads on X. A federal judge has already ruled that the FTC's demand likely violated the First Amendment.

Should the FTC attempt to bring an enforcement action against Apple over its news curation, the effort "would create significant First Amendment questions, and would likely be unconstitutional," Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology, tells MediaPost.

She notes that the Supreme Court in 1974 struck down a Florida law that would have required newspapers to publish politicians' speech.

What's more, Ruane says, Ferguson's letter to Apple may have violated the First Amendment, if the letter is seen as an attempt to force Apple to publish certain material.

"It's not permissible under the Constitution for the government to pressure speech intermediaries to publish or not publish speech," she says.

John Bergmayer, legal director at the advocacy group Public Knowledge, adds that aggregators like Apple News are entitled to the same First Amendment protection as organizations that report and write news.

The Supreme Court said in a 2024 ruling that social media companies -- which also curate content -- have First Amendment rights to wield control over content on their platforms.

The First Amendment “does not go on leave when social media are involved,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote at the time.

“This 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," Kagan wrote.

In the past, the FTC explicitly declined to investigate speech for political bias.

In 2020, former FTC Chair Joe Simon told Congress in 2020 that the agency was not empowered to regulate political speech, and former chair Timothy Muris in 2004 rejected a complaint against Fox News by advocacy group MoveOn.org, which had asked the agency to investigate whether the company dupes the public with the slogan “fair and balanced."

"There is no way to evaluate this petition without evaluating the content of the news at issue," Muris stated at the time. That is a task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency."