Happy Monday, I’m Eriq Gardner.

Welcome back to The Rainmaker, my private newsletter focused on the legal maneuvering inside Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street.

The Washington Post is rolling out new social media guidelines, but will they survive the Biden administration? In today’s email, I explain how the newspaper could land in trouble with labor cops. Plus new details on an Elon Musk-funded effort that could impact corporate speech on Twitter.

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Of course, the relationship between media companies and social platforms flipped into overdrive during Donald Trump’s presidency. Twitter, in particular, has emerged as an invaluable platform for journalists to tend their personal brands. But it has also become a daily habit where otherwise scrupulous media people drop the mask of objectivity, police each other’s politics, agitate for better working conditions, and litigate culture war issues in full view of the public. Baquet, in one of his last acts as executive editor before ceding the post to Joe Kahn last week, issued a memo begging Times journalists to spend less time on Twitter in order to preserve the appearance of objectivity and to protect the institution's brand. “Tweets or subtweets that attack, criticize or undermine the work of your colleagues are not allowed,” he wrote. Kahn quickly doubled down, urging newsroom staff not to “vet grievances” online.

But the industry-wide shift underway at places like the Times is easier said than done. And demands for employees to tamp down their political advocacy also introduces some complicated legal questions. Earlier this month, for instance, The Washington Post fired reporter Felicia Sonmez for relentlessly tweeting criticism of the paper’s leadership while calling for greater fairness in the workplace. The drama began, of course, with a colleague retweeting a sexist joke...