Kae Rosado doesn’t need the government’s permission to speak. She saw ICE activity in Chicago. She saw neighbors worried, confused, and looking for reliable information. So she did the American thing: When government power appeared in public, she talked about it. She created a Facebook group where her neighbors could join the conversation, and the group grew into Chicago’s largest ICE sighting page.
This was an ordinary act of community speech, rooted in American soil for 250 years.
But federal officials took aim at Kae’s group. They didn’t attempt to silence her directly. Instead, they demanded that Facebook do what the government cannot do itself: silence people discussing and criticizing its activity. Facebook immediately complied, cutting off over 100,000 members from a space they relied on for community information. The attorney general and secretary of homeland security then publicly took credit for the takedown.
But this was unconstitutional. It was censorship by proxy. Jawboning. And the First Amendment forbids the government from laundering censorship through private companies.
Kae’s experience is a more blatant and unsubtle evolution of a pattern previously seen in cases like Murthy v. Missouri: Government officials coerce platforms to suppress certain viewpoints without employing formal legal process. The mechanism is indirect but powerful. Speech is not banned outright, but it disappears because government officials apply pressure and platforms understand the consequences of refusing.
That leaves users with a basic question: Who is really setting the rules of the online public square?
Americans do not seem eager to hand that power to either side. In FIRE’s 2024 Social Media Report, 64% of Americans said they do not trust social media companies to make decisions about what speech is allowed online. That same portion also said they don’t trust the government to do it either.
Americans care not only about what platforms decide, but how they decide. In the September 2023 survey, 78% said unbiased moderation is important, 77% prioritized transparency about government involvement, and 71% supported appeal processes.
In other words, people may accept some level of online content moderation, but they are far less willing to trust systems that operate in the shadows with the government.
That concern becomes even sharper when government involvement is explicit. In FIRE’s latest edition of the National Speech Index, 75% of Americans said they were at least somewhat concerned about government pressure on tech companies to suppress viewpoints. And 77% said the same about government access to user data for surveillance.
Those concerns cut across ideology, but they shift with power. In the fall of 2023, Republicans were especially likely to distrust government involvement in speech decisions. By April 2026, liberals were especially likely to express concern about government pressure on tech companies.
That shift shows how quickly fears about censorship can change depending on who holds power and whose speech appears to be at risk. The First Amendment cannot depend on who’s in the White House. Government power may seem useful when aimed at your opponents, but becomes dangerous the moment it is aimed at you.
Jawboning is particularly corrosive because it is difficult to hold the government accountable for an action they pressured a third party into taking.
The same problem is likely to intensify as new technologies reshape public debate. FIRE’s June 2025 survey on AI in political campaigns found majorities worried that regulation could be used to suppress criticism or chill lawful expression. Whether the issue is social media moderation, government access to user data, or AI regulation, the principle is the same: The government cannot pressure private companies into suppressing lawful speech.
The future of free speech requires clear lines now.
Kae could have let the group vanish. She could have accepted defeat against Leviathan and moved on. Instead, she fought back. Together with FIRE, Kae is suing the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to vindicate her First Amendment rights.
A federal court has already recognized the danger, finding Kae and her co-plaintiff likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims and blocking the government from continuing its coercion campaign.
Her story is not just about one Facebook group. It’s about whether Americans can document and discuss government activity in public without federal officials leaning on social media companies to make that speech disappear. It’s about whether the government can sidestep the Constitution by jawboning people into silence. Simply put, the government doesn’t get to decide what speech survives online. And it doesn’t get to conscript private platforms to do its censorship bidding for it.
 | A guest post by
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