Earlier this month, Congress held a dramatic hearing with the heads of three private corporations that manage important forums for public debate. Members of Congress criticized these leaders in the strongest possible terms for their alleged failure to stem harmful speech on their property. The White House weighed in the next day to denounce the leaders’ equivocal answers, and both the Biden administration and Congress have announced multiple investigations into whether these and other institutions have violated federal law by not cracking down on this speech.

The previous paragraph obviously describes the efforts by federal lawmakers to pressure university presidents to more aggressively police anti-Semitic speech on campus. But it could just as easily describe another recent pressure campaign—the one directed at social-media platforms. These companies’ CEOs, too, have been hauled before Congress to account for their speech rules, had their policies denounced by the White House, been threatened with legal liability, and had private communications with government employees about what speech they allow on their platforms.

Despite these similarities, the two pressure campaigns have been received very differently. The Biden administration’s effort to influence social-media platforms’ content policies sparked a vociferous outcry from Republican officials, culminating in a First Amendment lawsuit that is now before the Supreme Court. The pressure campaign over university speech policies, by contrast, has generated very little alarm about the First Amendment interests of either the schools or their students. This is a problem, because the threat of government interference with free speech is very real in both contexts.

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