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Notes -
I’ll bite the bullet on this one!
If the government’s requests were limited to an open request or series of requests in full view of the public, then I’d have no issue.
However, if a wide reaching collection of disparate government agencies funnelled their requests in secret through a formal task force set up by the intelligence agencies in partnership with former intelligence agency officials now working at the social media firms and then denied that any such actions were being taken, I would be against it.
In other words, it’s not necessarily the request but the manner in which the requests were processed; the latter being too open to the abuses that we now know unfolded.
Having said that, there’s a principled difference between the kind of speech you’re referring to here and the kind of speech that is under question: yours is not political; whilst theirs is.
The government were specifically requesting that speech critical of them should be removed or deprioritised by the algorithm.
We’re talking speech critical of the government’s response to COVID; speech critical of how elections were handled; speech promoting true information that is harmful to the government bureaucracy’s favoured candidate.
Even speech promoting vaccine hesitancy should be viewed as political in this context given the government’s heavy handed advocacy, and often enforcement, of it.
So yes, there possibly are exceptions where the government can request that 1st amendment protected speech is better managed by private institutions that host that speech. However, they should not be setting up formal, secret networks to monitor speech in general, due to the potential for abuse, and should not be requesting political speech, critical of the government or promoting candidates or policies contrary to the government’s own, in particular.
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