Within an hour of the House Intelligence Committee’s Wednesday hearing with Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee’s ranking member, made a crucial point.

"Congress is not going to legislate an algorithm,” Schiff told BuzzFeed News in an interview off the house floor shortly after the hearing's’ conclusion.

The three companies were called to Washington the first week of November after admitting their services had been exploited by a Kremlin-linked effort that successfully inflamed political and cultural divisions in the US ahead of the 2016 presidential election. In one shocking case, the Russians used Facebook to spark dueling pro and anti-islam rallies in the same place at the same time; Hundreds attended.

But in a single sentence, Schiff, a top leader of the US government’s investigation into Russia’s chaos campaign, dismissed any notion that legislators would pass laws that might restrain the massive computational engines that power Facebook’s feed, Twitter’s timeline, and Google’s search.

Said Schiff, "Some of this may be beyond our regulatory reach.”

Though members of Congress were fierce in their excoriation of Facebook, Google and Twitter this week, their reprimands are not as toothy as they might sound — something Schiff readily conceded. Any law forcing Facebook, Google, or Twitter to change the way they rank information would likely be a clear First Amendment violation, going against the amendment's stipulation that Congress can’t impose freedom of speech restrictions. In the unlikely event such a law were to pass, Supreme Court precedent going back 40 years would make it very hard for it to stick. If regulatory measures are put in place as a result of the hearings, they may be be severely restrained.

For more than 40 years now, there’s been legal precedent that will make it difficult for Congress to do anything too severe to these companies. The precedent was set in 1974 when the Supreme Court struck down a Florida state law requiring newspapers to give politicians equal space free of charge when editorials or stories were written about them. That case, Miami Herald v. Tornillo, saw political candidate Pat Tornillo, Jr. argue that newspapers were so powerful in their economic heft and distribution, that they should be forced to give all sides space to air their views. The court acknowledged their dominance, but still said that the law couldn’t force them to alter their content.

Like the newspapers of the 1970s, Facebook is today an unrivaled distributor of information. But no matter how much influence the company has, the Tornillo case on the makes it unlikely Congress will ever be able to legislate its News Feed, Duke Law School professor Stuart Benjamin told BuzzFeed News.