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Agencies would have to log pressure on online speech
Representative Scott Perry’s bill would force a five-year lookback on contacts with outside platforms. The reports go to the Office of Management and Budget first, with names, offices, legal authority and outcomes included.
Five years of agency contacts with online platforms would go on the record under a House bill from Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry. The proposal is aimed at the federal government’s role in moderating lawful speech, not illegal content, and it would require agencies to account for any past pressure to remove, suppress, label or restrict access to that speech.
The Accountability for Government Censorship Act would give agencies 90 days after enactment to file reports with the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB. Instead of a simple tally, the bill asks for a detailed inventory of who was involved, what happened, and what authority, if any, supported the contact.
The five-year paper trail
The lookback reaches to the five years immediately before enactment, so the report would not start from scratch. It would sweep in communications with platforms that are not owned or operated by the federal government, and the bill defines platform broadly enough to include an interactive computer service.
That matters because the bill is not just about social media in the casual sense. It is about a wider class of online services where federal employees may have tried to shape what users could see, share or access.
What agencies would have to spell out
The report would have to name the sub-agency, bureau or office where the employee worked, along with the employee’s position and supervisors. If the contact rested on a statute or other legal authority, the agency would have to identify that too.
That level of detail would turn a disputed policy area into something Congress could audit line by line. The resulting record would not prove censorship happened in every case, but it would make it harder for those interactions to remain vague or hidden behind broad descriptions.
A record for oversight
The practical effect is a paper trail built for oversight. Lawmakers would get a clearer view of how federal employees interacted with platforms over speech moderation, while the public would still have to wait for Congress and the executive branch to decide what to do with the findings.
For Perry and the bill’s backers, the premise is that any pressure campaign aimed at lawful speech should be visible enough to reconstruct after the fact. The question the proposal leaves hanging is how often those contacts happened, and how far the government was willing to go.