I kind of lost the thread with this comment. The White House can make pretty much any request of Twitter and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook, in turn, can deci

I kind of lost the thread with this comment. The White House can make pretty much any request of Twitter and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook, in turn, can decide whether to act on those requests. The social media aspect is new, but otherwise, this is bog standard big corp <-> fed gov politics. Every prior president has used the bully pulpit to encourage very large companies to do things, and followed up/paired those requests with a concert of relevant activity within the executive branch. FB/Twitter are not "acting as an arm of the federal government" except in the most sensational and hyperbolic foaming-at-the-mouth-talking-head sense; in the same sense as, for example, saying that Carrier was an arm of the federal government during the Trump years.