Ahead of a key court hearing Thursday, Republicans have released a series of documents indicating that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to reduce or remove content related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has deemed these releases the “Facebook Files,” and has promoted them on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Jordan’s branding is an effort to link them to the “Twitter Files,” a series of internal documents released by Elon Musk’s X this past winter that were extensively covered by conservative media.
Jordan has claimed that the pressure from Biden administration officials on Facebook — primarily in 2021 — rises to the level of government coercion of private companies and is a violation of the First Amendment.
However, court decisions in recent years have established that coercion requires the threat of state power. The lack of any specific threats in the Biden administration messages would make it hard for Jordan to prove his case in court.
Republicans also widely claim that the actions of social media companies to remove, label or restrict content is censorship. But what legal precedent there is would support the opposite conclusion — that companies have a First Amendment right to “editorial discretion,” to control what speech appears or does not appear on their property.
For the last two weeks, Jordan — who chairs the House Oversight Committee — has released a series of internal...
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