The House of Representative last week passed a bill to protect online speech from federal officials. House Republicans drafted the proposal largely in response to reporting that revealed federal employees—often in law enforcement or public-health agencies—have asked social media platforms to moderate users' legally protected speech.
For instance, in one edition of the "Twitter Files," a series of reports based on internal Twitter records, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that the FBI's correspondence with the platform was "constant and pervasive." Taibbi found that "there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth" between January 2020 and November 2022. The FBI, wary of election misinformation, regularly reported even satirical content to Twitter. This sort of coordination between officials and platforms was the norm, not an aberration.
