Government pressures tech behind the scenes, says former Facebook employee. It’s called jawboning.

It’s something government officials on both sides of the aisle are known to do: pressuring tech platforms to bend to their will, aka jawboning. But the line between persuasion and coercion, or even censorship, can get murky. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from two states alleging that the Joe Biden administration illegally coerced social media companies into blocking conservative content. Matt Perault, now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center on Technology Policy, says that in his former job working in policy at Facebook, jawboning happened all the time.