What it said
None of these episodes starts with a censorship order. They start with a phone call, a briefing, a podium remark, or a podcast interview. The name for that is jawboning: a person with public power tells a private company what he would like done with somebody else's speech, and leaves the company to decide whether it heard a request or a warning.
The lines that matter are short, and both parties supplied them. In July 2021 Biden press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
A day later the President said of the platforms They're killing people.
Facebook answered that it will not be distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts.
Four years later, with the other party in the White House, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission spoke about an ABC late-night host.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
Carr had called Jimmy Kimmel's 15 September monologue about the killing of Charlie Kirk some of the sickest conduct possible.
Nexstar, which needed FCC approval for a $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna, pulled the show from its ABC stations. ABC then said the program will be pre-empted indefinitely.
President Trump called the news great news for America.
Who made it and why
The record on this page has several authors, and they do not line up neatly by party.
The laptop week, October 2020. The New York Post ran emails on 14 October that it said came from Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter blocked links to the story under its hacked-materials rule and locked the paper's account. The next day its policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, said Twitter would stop removing hacked content unless the hackers or people working with them shared it, and would label instead. Facebook cut the story's reach for about a week while fact-checkers looked at it. Mark Zuckerberg later told Joe Rogan (25 August 2022) that the FBI had warned platforms beforehand to be on high alert
for a dump,
and that the warning did not name this story, which in his words fit the pattern.
That account is the only source the archive has for what the FBI briefings said. On 19 October, 51 former intelligence officials, private citizens at the time, signed a letter saying the story had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation
while also writing that they did not know if the emails were genuine and had no evidence of Russian involvement. In March 2022 two experts examining a copy of the data for the Washington Post authenticated thousands of the emails by their cryptographic signatures; most of roughly 129,000 could not be checked either way. In June 2024 federal prosecutors put the laptop into evidence at Hunter Biden's gun trial. Jack Dorsey had already told a House committee on 25 March 2021: We made a total mistake with the New York Post.
The Twitter Files. Beginning 2 December 2022, Matt Taibbi and then Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss published internal Twitter material released by Elon Musk. Taibbi reported that in 2020 requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.
He also wrote that he had seen no evidence of government involvement in the laptop decision. The Biden campaign was not the government in October 2020, and reporting from archived copies found that four of five tweets in its flagged email contained non-consensual nude images, which Twitter's rules already barred. In February 2023 a former Twitter employee testified that the Trump White House had asked in 2019 for removal of a Chrissy Teigen tweet insulting the President; Twitter left it up. Later threads covered FBI emails flagging accounts. The FBI called those contacts traditional, longstanding and ongoing.
Meta's account. On 26 August 2024 Zuckerberg wrote to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan that in 2021 Biden officials repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,
that Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down,
and that Facebook shouldn't have demoted
the laptop story. The White House replied that it had encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety.
In January 2025 Meta ended U.S. third-party fact-checking.
The broadcaster. After Carr's remarks, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican who chairs the Commerce Committee, likened them to a mobster in a bar saying Nice bar you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez objected as well. Kimmel returned on ABC on 23 September; Nexstar and Sinclair stations held out until 26 September. Nexstar said it acted unilaterally.
Carr said Kimmel's trouble arose because of his ratings, not because of anything that's happened at the federal government level.
In 2026 the FCC ordered early license-renewal filings for ABC stations, citing a review of Disney's diversity policies, and ABC told the agency the order's true purpose and inescapable effect
was to suppress speech.
Abroad. Foreign governments used formal law rather than phone calls. The European Commission fined X EUR 120 million on 5 December 2025 under the Digital Services Act on three transparency counts, after preliminary findings in July 2024. Commissioner Thierry Breton's letter to Musk of 12 August 2024, before Musk's live interview with Donald Trump, was the informal piece, and a Commission spokesperson said the letter had not been agreed with President von der Leyen. In Brazil, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X suspended on 30 August 2024 after it refused court orders; access returned on 8 October once X complied and paid fines. The United Kingdom's Online Safety Act 2023 gives Ofcom statutory powers. On 23 December 2025 the State Department barred Breton and four others from entry.
What it got right or wrong
Start with what courts actually decided, because both camps quote them loosely.
Bantam Books v. Sullivan (18 February 1963) is the old rule. A Rhode Island morality commission with no power to ban anything mailed book distributors lists of objectionable
titles and mentioned it could refer cases to prosecutors. The Supreme Court called it a system of informal censorship
and struck it down.
National Rifle Association v. Vullo (30 May 2024) applied that rule unanimously. New York's financial regulator had urged insurers and banks to drop the NRA. Justice Sotomayor wrote for the Court:
Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.
The test it uses asks whether the official's words, viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat.
The ACLU argued the NRA's side; its legal director David Cole said the group disagrees with the NRA's advocacy
and was still proud to defend its right to speak.
Murthy v. Missouri (26 June 2024) did not decide the merits. In the trial court, Judge Terry Doughty had issued a preliminary injunction on 4 July 2023 against many federal officials, and the Fifth Circuit found that the White House, Surgeon General, FBI, CDC and, in a revised opinion, CISA had likely coerced or significantly encouraged platforms, while narrowing the order. The Supreme Court stayed that injunction on 20 October 2023, took the case, and then ruled 6 to 3 on standing alone. Justice Barrett's majority said the plaintiffs had not shown a substantial risk
of future injury traceable to a Government defendant,
that a number of the lower court's findings appear to be clearly erroneous,
and that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.
Justice Alito, for himself and Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, called the conduct blatantly unconstitutional
and warned: If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by.
On remand, a consent decree approved in March 2026 bars the Surgeon General, CDC and CISA from threatening platforms to remove protected speech. The government admitted nothing, and a consent decree is not a ruling that anyone broke the law.
So: no court has held on the merits that the Biden contacts were unconstitutional, and none has held that Carr's remarks were. Saying otherwise overstates the record. Saying the contacts were cleared also overstates it. Murthy closed the door on those plaintiffs, not on the question.
What can be said without a court is that several of the words were badly chosen for officials. Flagging problematic posts
does not say what the White House wanted done to them. Take action
on a comedian does not say which action. A regulator who holds a merger approval in his hand and speaks of the easy way or the hard way
has made his own words the evidence. A President calling a company a killer is speech, and the government has speech rights; it is also leverage when the speaker can sue, regulate, or investigate. Twitter's laptop block was, in its own CEO's word, a mistake, and there is no court finding that the government ordered it.
The government may talk, but not threaten
The government may talk. It may argue, correct, and criticize, in its own name. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher, arguing for the government in Murthy on 18 March 2024, put the line fairly: government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading or criticizing private speakers.
That statement is correct, and it is the standard to hold both administrations to.
The open question is where a request ends and a threat begins when the person asking also holds a license, a merger, an investigation, or a regulatory file over the listener. Here the libertarian reading applies. The more power the asker holds over the company, the less a private request is ever really private, and the more the official should be expected to say his piece to the public instead of to the company's trust-and-safety desk. A free press does not need officials who are clever enough to stay under the Bantam Books line. It needs officials who do not go near it. That reading cuts the same way for a Democratic White House on vaccine posts and a Republican FCC on a monologue. FIRE, which backed the Murthy plaintiffs, said the Carr remarks were jawboning any way you slice it.
That consistency is the right one.
The foreign cases are different in kind, and it is fair to say so. A fine under a statute or a court suspension is on the record and can be appealed, though X says it received a threat against its legal representative in a secret order.
Whether Americans should want their platforms shaped by Brussels or Brasília is a sovereignty question as much as a speech question. Rubio's call that the DSA fine was an attack on all American tech platforms
and Virkkunen's reply that the law has nothing to do with censorship
are both positions, not findings.
Its legacy
Before platforms, the template was formal and visible: in the First World War years, Postmaster General Albert Burleson used Title XII of the Espionage Act to declare publications unmailable, a decision that was itself the ban. Or it was hidden on purpose: a bureau that slipped stories to friendly reporters, as in COINTELPRO. The modern version is softer and harder to see: the official owns no press and issues no order, and the company does the deleting. The 2022 DHS board died partly because nobody could say what it would not do.
The practical test for a reader is plain. Who asked? What power did the asker hold over the company? Which verb was used, and what did it stand in for? What did the company do next? Apply it to the party you vote for first.
Sources
- FRAME case study "Government pressure on platforms and broadcasters ("jawboning"), 2020-2026," for the chronology, quotations, and the court holdings as summarized there.
- Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963); National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024); Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024); Missouri v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-01213 (W.D. La., 4 July 2023); State of Missouri v. Biden, No. 23-30445 (5th Cir. 2023), as cited there.
- Missouri v. Biden consent decree, March 2026, as reported by the First Amendment Encyclopedia, NCLA, and Lawfare, cited there.
- Dorsey testimony, House Energy and Commerce Committee, 25 March 2021; House Oversight Committee hearing, 8 February 2023; Zuckerberg letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, 26 August 2024; Psaki briefing and Biden remarks, July 2021; Carr, Cruz, Gomez, Nexstar and ABC statements, September 2025 and 2026; FIRE, ACLU and EFF statements, all as cited there.
- European Commission, IP/25/2934 (5 December 2025); Regulation (EU) 2022/2065; Breton letter to Musk, 12 August 2024; State Department visa restrictions, 23 December 2025; Columbia Global Freedom of Expression on the X suspension in Brazil; Online Safety Act 2023, as cited there.