26 Feb 2025 Kudos to Comcast For Making Meaningful Changes In Response to National Center Proposal

On Monday, the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) team agreed to withdraw the shareholder proposal we had submitted to Comcast in exchange for Comcast making meaningful positive changes to its terms of service, advancing religious liberty and viewpoint neutrality.

Our proposal requested that Comcast’s Board of Directors conduct an evaluation and issue a report on how it oversees risks related to denying or restricting services to users or customers based on their viewpoint under “hate speech,” “misinformation” and related policies.

In response, Comcast agreed to:

1. Expressly include “religious beliefs and political ideologies” as generally acceptable “divergent points of view” (subject to factual substantiation) in NBCU’s and Peacock’s “controversial issue” ad guidelines and the EffecTV policy on the cable distribution side of the business.

2. Include the following statement in an expanded discussion of advertising in Comcast’s SASB report: We place advertising for our products and services without regard to political or religious views or status, subject to our brand standards and intent to reach the broadest possible target audience.

3. Update Comcast’s “Religious Advertising” guidelines to expressly affirm that “NBCUniversal accepts religious advertisements that express divergent points of view.”

In addition to reducing censorship risks to shareholder value, these changes are consistent with President Trump’s recent Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Executive Order.

We commend Comcast for working with us to implement these changes. We also thank our allies at Alliance Defending Freedom for working with us on this engagement.