by rendall | 2025-11-06 18:15:10+00:00
Two clarifications.

1) “Leverage” isn’t a magic word for formal jurisdiction. In Bantam Books and Backpage v. Dart, courts held that informal pressure by officials with perceived authority can be unconstitutional even without direct regulatory power. Dart couldn’t yank Visa/MasterCard’s licenses, yet his letters were a “thinly veiled threat” because of who he was and the context. That’s the point: when executive offices speak, companies rationally infer consequences.

2) On the Hunter-laptop episode. No one said there was a signed takedown order. The record shows ongoing FBI briefings with platforms about an expected “hack-and-leak,” which Zuckerberg has publicly said influenced Facebook’s throttling decision, and Twitter’s trust-and-safety leadership has acknowledged regular FBI/DHS/CISA meetings that shaped their risk assessment. That’s textbook jawboning territory: successful or not, the effect is to steer moderation during a live election controversy.

Saying CDC/HHS/DHS/White House have “no leverage” over platforms is formalistic. The same companies live under FTC/DOJ antitrust and privacy scrutiny, rely on federal partnerships and contracts, and face security coordination with DHS/CISA. You don’t need a direct “social-media regulator” for requests to carry weight.

I’m not arguing the government may never request anything. That's a straw man, to be honest. I said that when executive offices lean on intermediaries about contested political or scientific speech, the line between request and command gets thin, exactly what Bantam and Backpage warn about. If you think that line doesn’t matter when your side is doing the leaning, that’s the problem I’m describing.

Matt Taibbi’s reporting in the Twitter Files documented extensive, routine communication between federal agencies and social-media companies, especially Twitter, in the years surrounding the 2020 election. His threads showed the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency forwarding lists of accounts, flagging posts, and requesting follow-ups under the broad banner of “election integrity” or “misinformation.” In many cases, the content was neither foreign nor illegal but domestic political speech such as memes, jokes, or criticism. Internal Twitter correspondence revealed a level of comfort with this channel of government “recommendations,” which Taibbi argued amounted to a systemic outsourcing of censorship decisions to state-linked actors.

He did not claim that the FBI directly ordered suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the tweet you cited makes that clear. What he did show was that these same agencies had repeatedly warned platforms to watch for “hack-and-leak” operations involving foreign actors, including topics related to the Biden family. Those briefings primed the platforms to treat the New York Post story as suspect. Taibbi concluded that while there may have been no explicit instruction to take down that story, the government-tech coordination created a standing presumption of guilt that led companies to pre-emptively restrict politically sensitive material: a subtler but still powerful form of state influence over speech.

That distinction between ordering and conditioning seems to be getting lost here. When an agency with investigative or regulatory power builds an expectation that certain narratives are suspect, the practical effect on private moderation decisions can be indistinguishable from direct censorship. Courts have long recognized this kind of “informal coercion” as constitutionally suspect, because a government that can shape public discourse indirectly is not meaningfully less powerful than one that does so by fiat.

Taibbi is hardly a partisan instrument. His work has angered every political faction at one time or another. The fact that someone with his record of independence and skepticism found this level of coordination between state agencies and platforms should concern anyone who cares about a free press regardless of which administration is in power.

Feel free to have the last word. Know that I’ll carefully read and consider whatever you write, but I probably won’t respond.