If you think the days of heavy-handed censorship are behind us, think again — and listen to people like Ryan Bangert of Alliance Defending Freedom who have been sounding the alarm for years. Bangert has repeatedly warned that during the COVID years the White House leaned on social media platforms to take down messaging that contradicted its preferred line on masks, vaccines, and lockdowns, and those warnings deserve our full attention as Americans who care about free speech and religious liberty. This wasn’t mere political persuasion; it was an attempt to steer the new public square away from dissenting views and toward a single approved narrative.
Even the CEOs who once cooperated with government requests are now admitting what conservatives have long suspected — that pressure from officials crossed the line into inappropriate influence. Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the Biden White House pressured Facebook to suppress certain COVID-related content, a confession that should make every defender of the First Amendment sit up and take notice. When the chairman of a tech giant looks back and says his company bowed to government pressure, that confirms the danger of letting bureaucrats and Big Tech police our conversations.
This is not just theory; it has played out in the courts and in public investigations. Judges and appellate panels have at times recognized the risk of government coercion in communications with platforms, and the controversy surrounding those contacts has produced legal battles and congressional subpoenas that exposed internal emails and troubling coordination. The nation cannot tolerate a system where federal officials effectively outsource censorship to private companies and then hide behind the claim that the platforms acted independently.
Good news is starting to appear: after years of heavy moderation and third-party fact-checking that often censored mainstream debate, Meta announced sweeping changes to restore free expression on its platforms, ditching its fact-checking program in favor of community-driven notes and simpler policies. That move — controversial to some — is a welcome pivot back toward open debate and away from the paternalistic content policing that punished ordinary Americans for voicing doubts or questioning consensus. If Big Tech intends to stop playing judge, jury, and executioner of speech, conservatives must hold them to it.
This fight isn’t just about social media algorithms; it’s about whether people of faith can speak and live according to their convictions without being criminalized or deplatformed. ADF has been on the front lines defending believers like Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen and Americans who have faced penalties for praying or expressing traditional beliefs, showing that the global trend toward censorship often targets religious conscience first. Those cases are a warning: when speech is labeled “misinformation” or “hate,” the real casualty is the freedom to live and worship openly.
Americans who cherish liberty should not be naive. Congressional investigations, committee reports, and public disclosures have revealed a pattern of cozy relationships between government officials and social media executives that demands accountability and reform. We must support organizations fighting these abuses, push elected leaders to protect the First Amendment, and insist that the new public square remains a place for robust, even uncomfortable debate — because silence in the face of overreach is the first step toward losing everything our Founders entrusted to us.
