There’s a wonderful story about the longtime humor columnist Art Buchwald — now gone, alas. Supposedly he was at a diplomatic reception when he was cornered by the Secretary of State, who told him that the Soviet Union was using his satire of the American government for propaganda purposes. “Oh, no,” Buchwald supposedly exclaimed, “stop them.” Which is kind of how we feel about government complaints against social media.

The subject took center stage this week with the airing of a letter that the proprietor of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, sent to the House Judiciary Committee, conceding that the Biden-Harris camarilla “repeatedly pressured” his social media company to censor content related to the Covid-19 pandemic, including “humor and satire.” The White House officials, he added, “expressed a lot of frustration” when his team pushed back on their requests. 

Mr. Zuckerberg described the White House’s pressure as “wrong” and expressed “regret” for not being “more outspoken” about it. His about-face extended to Meta’s decision, ahead of the 2020 election, to help bury the New York Post’s coverage of the findings from Hunter Biden’s laptop. The FBI had warned Meta of Russian disinformation plots, Mr. Zuckerberg says. Yet the Post’s reporting was vindicated, and critics argue the censorship tilted the election.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s confirmation that the White House tested free speech boundaries in its regulation of “misinformation” is not news per se. Elon Musk blew the whistle on it when, after acquiring Twitter in 2022, he released internal company documents showing how the platform caved to demands to suppress content. One document shows a Twitter employee sharing posts “to review from the Biden team.” Another employee responds: “handled these.” 

“It would’ve been nice to have Zuckerberg’s testimony in connection with the case that the Supreme Court considered at the end of the term,” a former assistant United States attorney, Andrew McCarthy, observed, in a reference to Murthy v. Missouri. In that dispute, states and individuals argued that the White House had coerced social media platforms to suppress conservative voices. A federal judge compared the effort to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.”

Even so, Columbia Law’s Philip Hamburger, whose New Civil Liberties Alliance helped lead the charge in court against the censorship regime, notes how Mr. Zuckerberg “distances Meta’s censorship decisions” from “government pressure.” Meta’s chief says “it was our decision” to “take content down, and we own our decisions.” Mr. Hamburger contends Mr. Zuckerberg wants “to avoid having Meta treated as a state actor” and to evade liability.

The New York Post, though, in a well-deserved victory lap editorial, avers that “it absolutely matters that Mark Zuckerberg has come clean, and taken steps so that Facebook won’t get fooled again.” That’s because, the Post warns, the so-called “experts” are already “busy plotting how to grab more power if Harris and Walz win — and looking to help make that happen.” That underscores the stakes over online censorship as Election Day nears.

After all, when Murthy reached the Supreme Court, the Nine sided with the White House by six to three, finding that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. Mr. Zuckerberg’s contrition, Mr. McCarthy says, “could’ve been something to help that.” The significance of the case was underscored by Justice Alito in his dissent: “If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.” 

Justice Alito called the White House censorship regime “blatantly unconstitutional,” adding, in a nod to the election, “the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.” So, as November 5 nears, the integrity of the nation’s largest social media platform hinges on Mr. Zuckerberg’s pledge to “not compromise our content standards due to pressure” from the government. Even Art Buchwald might have had trouble satirizing that turn of events.