DOJ Says it will Dial Back Online Content Coercion

By Lawson Faulkner

On Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department announced a department policy for communicating with social media platforms about content moderation decisions. According to the revised standards, federal officials are now barred from pressuring platforms to remove content, signaling a retreat from past examples of coercion that have plagued the Biden administration.

While the DOJ’s revised approach seems to be a step in the right direction, it is too early to determine if this announcement is a victory for free speech. Government assurances of platform autonomy are certainly commendable, but the Biden administration’s turbulent relationship with content moderation leaves room for skepticism. It remains to be seen whether the DOJ will uphold its commitment to restraint, especially on the eve of a consequential election.

According to the announcement, popular platforms such as X, Facebook and YouTube will no longer be harassed by FBI and DOJ officials over content relating to national security or election interference issues. As the Justice Department conceded, “our focus is on disrupting the foreign actors behind the accounts and exposing their hidden hand.” However, wanton coercion over speculative content will no longer be tolerated. Whether a platform chooses to remove controversial posts, or do nothing altogether, will now be left to the sole discretion of company personnel.

In recent years, this caliber of government restraint has been absent. To understand the White House’s rocky record on content moderation, one should look no further than the harassment of Elon Musk, a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s free speech abuses.

As early as November 2022, President Biden deemed Musk “worthy of being looked at” following his pledge to remain a “free speech absolutist” as owner of X. After Musk’s release of the Twitter Files, which revealed the Biden administration’s repeated attempts to censor Facebook and Twitter content during the Covid-19 pandemic, the White House’s ambivalence has only grown.

Following these revelations, which a federal judge described as “an almost dystopian scenario”, Musk’s various companies have endured a torrent of administrative persecution, earning investigations from the DOJ, FAA, FTC, SEC, NLRB, and many others. Luckily, however, Musk’s resistance has ignited a chain reaction among concerned lawmakers, with the House Judiciary Committee also taking action against the Biden administration’s “censorship industrial complex.”

In recent months, lawmakers have uncovered further evidence to corroborate the Biden administration’s underlying culture of content coercion. In testimony submitted to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Zuckerberg confessed that White House officials had pressured his company to censor certain pandemic-related content as well. Zuckerberg explained that “senior officials from the Biden administration…repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire.” While White House officials acknowledged Meta’s authority over moderation decisions, Zuckerberg recalled that they “expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

Given this concerning revelation, it should come as no shock that the DOJ is looking to refresh its commitment to online free speech protections. For now, consideration for free speech will serve as a valuable North Star for online content moderation disputes. However, while revised principles could mark a shift towards greater platform independence, it remains to be seen whether the DOJ will keep its promises.