The “Twitter Files” reporting from last year exposed a disturbing collusion between Twitter executives and officials from the federal government to censor the public’s speech. But new revelations from Congress show that the Biden White House and Facebook have engaged in similar collusion.

On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who leads the House Judiciary Committee, released internal Facebook emails that show the Big Tech platform was explicitly pressured by the Biden administration to take down specific posts that the president’s allies disliked.

“Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan alleged .

The congressman brought receipts. He released one email from April 2021 in which a Facebook employee writes that employees “are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House,” with the White House even asking them to take down one specific meme. In another email , a top Facebook executive recounts that Biden senior adviser Andy Slavitt was “outraged” in an interaction with company officials over the fact that they wouldn’t remove the meme.

This pressure campaign from the White House meaningfully influenced Facebook’s moderation policies. For example, the Biden administration apparently complained about a specific Tucker Carlson video, and Facebook responded by saying it had reduced the video’s reach by 50%.

Another internal email shows broad changes considered in response to pressure from Biden’s White House: “[Facebook’s] Leadership asked Misinfo Policy ... to brainstorm some additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against ... misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”

Other emails show Facebook censoring additional content at the behest of President Joe Biden’s surgeon general.

Jordan concluded , “These documents, AND OTHERS that were just produced to the Committee, prove that the Biden Admin abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance.”

Based on the evidence, it’s hard to disagree with that conclusion. When private platforms choose of their own volition to censor or moderate certain content, that’s not a First Amendment matter. (It still might be wrong or overzealous, and we’re free to criticize their decisions.) But when they do so in response to aggressive pressure from governmental officials, that tramples all over the spirit of the First Amendment. So, with perhaps narrowly tailored exceptions for national security, it shouldn’t even be legal for government officials to lobby private platforms to censor the public.

This is an outrage — and the backlash should be bipartisan. After all, do Democrats really want Republicans lobbying private platforms to get them censored when they’re the ones in office?

Hence why Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) asked , “When will the first brave Democrat step forward to condemn this violation of the First Amendment?”

Maybe a few honest liberals might come out against this. But don’t hold your breath waiting on a major reaction from the Democratic establishment; unfortunately, this is the exact kind of thing they think the federal government should be doing. And that’s the truly scary part of this whole saga.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, YouTuber , co-founder of BASEDPolitics , and a Washington Examiner contributor.