Covid Censorship on Facebook Stretched 1st Amendment – Free Speech Lawyers

Free speech lawyers have expressed caution about government overreach, after Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed the government “pressured” his company to censor content during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, told Newsweek that he agreed with Zuckerberg that platforms were sometimes too quick to take down content in response to government pressure.
“Platforms should of course listen carefully to the government’s information and arguments,” Jaffer said, “but they can’t turn over to the government the authority to decide what content to publish. Nor does the Constitution allow the government to demand that authority.
“The First Amendment properly draws a line between government efforts to persuade, which are permissible, and government efforts to coerce, which aren’t.”
The discussion comes in the wake of a letter Zuckerberg sent on Monday to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, in which Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, faced “pressure” from the Biden administration to suppress COVID-19-related content, including humor and satire.
In the letter, Zuckerberg stated that Meta ultimately made its own decisions about content removal but regretted not being more vocal about the undue government pressure.
The Biden Administration admitted in 2021 that it was notifying Facebook about posts that allegedly spread COVID-19 misinformation as part of efforts to combat what U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy described as “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health,” but Zuckerberg’s letter suggests the notifications went too far.
He expressed that, while Meta should not have compromised its standards under such influence, it did so during the pandemic.
“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction,” Zuckerberg wrote, “and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Zuckerberg also revealed that in 2020, the FBI warned Meta that the controversial Hunter Biden laptop story might be “Russian disinformation,” causing the platform to demote content related to the controversy while it independently fact checked the FBI’s claim.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
Zuckerberg’s letter raises legal and constitutional concerns about the blurred boundaries between governmental influence and corporate discretion, particularly as it relates to First Amendment rights.
The House Judiciary Committee posted the letter on X, writing that it revealed Facebook censored Americans and throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story. “Big win for free speech,” the post read.
Several other political figures claimed the letter as a win for free speech.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, who last week suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, wrote on X that Zuckerberg was confirming a view that was previously considered a conspiracy theory.
“Looks like Mark Zuckerberg has joined the ranks of the crazed conspiracy theorists who claim that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor dissent during Covid,” he wrote on Tuesday. The post had been viewed 5.6 million times by Wednesday.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote on X that Zuckerberg’s apology “rings hollow for the hundreds of THOUSANDS who remain shadow-banned on his platforms. I haven’t forgotten. Our work to preserve free speech is just getting started.”
Nadine Strossen, a legal scholar and former chair of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed some of those concerns, telling Newsweek that the government potentially violated First Amendment principles.
“Zuckerberg’s letter is very carefully written because he uses the word “censorship” which is pretty strong,” Strossen said.
“I think he comes very close to saying it [the government’s messaging to Meta] did have a coercive element and in the future we’re not going to yield to that.
According to Strossen, while private platforms like Meta have the right to control content as part of their own free speech rights, the line is crossed when government pressure becomes coercive.
She said that if the government’s involvement amounts to coercion, this could be considered censorship by proxy.
Strossen drew attention to similar concerns raised in the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri (originally filed as Missouri v. Biden), where in June, the Court voted 6-3 that a group of Republican-led states lacked standing to sue the federal government over its efforts to combat misinformation.
Strossen said the debate centered on whether platforms acted voluntarily to censor perceived misinformation or did so under undue government influence.
“Encouragement [from the government] is fine. Discouragement is fine. But the question is, does it go so far? That it is no longer just encouragement, but becomes unduly coercive pressure, and an inappropriate degree of government involvement.”
She pointed out that no matter the political party in power, such tactics are likely to be repeated unless there is a clear commitment to protecting free speech.
“As dangerous and harmful as a lot of what’s on them [social media platforms] might be, it’s much more dangerous and much more harmful to empower governments, especially behind closed doors, secretly, to achieve censorial goals by strong-arming private companies that have their own first amendment rights, and therefore, depriving the rest of us of important information and the opportunity to make our own judgments,” she said.