Another controversial term enters the tech lexicon.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jamale. It's something government officials on both sides of the aisle are known to do, pressuring private platforms to bend to their

will, aka job owning. But the line between persuasion and coercion or even government censorship,

can get a little murky.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments

from two states alleging the Biden administration

illegally coerced social media companies into blocking conservative content.

Matt Peral of UNC Chapel Hill's Center on Technology Policy says in his former job working in policy at Facebook,

job owning happened all the time.

So there's lots of educational informational communication that occurs between

tech platforms and the government, and I think that's largely a positive thing and I think most people think that that falls on the constitutional

permitted side of the line. The question is when does it shift from education or information or advising or persuasion into coercion and I think that's

really what's at the root of the questions on the case. So you spent nearly a

decade on Facebook's policy development team and you've been pretty blunt about how you

were job-owned by the government while you were there and I quote repeatedly and

routinely how so what are some examples that you remember?

Yeah, so this was every day.

It was Republicans, it was Democrats, it was not just the U.S. government, it was foreign governments as well.

And so in a post that Katie Harbeth,

who used to work at Facebook and I wrote

for the Night First Amendment Institute,

...