Some of the loudest conservative and MAGA voices on Capitol Hill — who’ve been endlessly demanding taxpayer-funded, high-profile investigations into Big Tech “bias” and “collusion” — were themselves engaged in the behavior they now claim is colluding.

“This is one of the original concerns about content moderation and platform power, that they could be used by the government to take down speech that the government wants censored and that it couldn’t couldn’t get taken down through legal mechanisms,” says Evelyn Douek, a professor of law who studies content moderation at Stanford Law School. “One of the things in the scholarship around this for a long time is a desire to make government and platform relationships more transparent and more formalized so that you can’t just have random people calling random employees trying to get stuff removed or put back up.”