The Biden administration wasn't just trying to police COVID posts. It wanted broader control over health information, and newly released internal documents show former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's office was actively strategizing how to make it happen.
The documents Protect the Public's Trust obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) date back to 2021, when the Biden administration was already pushing Facebook and other technology companies to remove content it labeled misinformation.
One exchange from May 2021 is particularly revealing.
Murthy's policy adviser, Daniel Tartakovsky, suggested that the administration's efforts should reach considerably further than COVID.
"May be worth emphasizing that you don’t just see this as a COVID-related issue (i.e., it’s health and medical misinformation, not just COVID-related misinformation). More broadly, it gets at the issue of how social media impacts people, especially young people."
So much for the temporary emergency justification. Officials were already considering a much larger role for the federal government in deciding what Americans should be allowed to discuss.
Another memorandum, prepared for Murthy's "misinformation tiger team" (yes, that was a real thing), outlined an approach involving "maximum pressure" on social media companies. It also celebrated the temporary suspension of then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account as "momentum" toward removing more accounts.
The same memorandum acknowledged that the campaign could politicize the Surgeon General's office by involving it in a "social media/censorship war."
Apparently, that wasn't enough to discourage anyone.
This wasn't simply a matter of issuing public health guidance. A 2024 House Judiciary Committee investigation concluded that White House pressure influenced moderation decisions at Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon. Committee Republicans found that the material targeted included satire, factual information, and posts that hadn't violated the companies' own policies.
The Biden administration was so busy policing misinformation that even accurate information wasn't necessarily safe.
And Murthy's office had been leaving fingerprints on the process for years.
Earlier documents released by Protect the Public's Trust showed his staff preparing talking points for interviews in July 2021. Those materials acknowledged that officials were flagging posts for social media companies and requesting policy changes from Facebook.
Murthy also received prepared responses to criticism of the government's involvement. Asked whether the campaign amounted to cancel culture, his suggested answer was that it was actually the opposite.
Naturally.
Protect the Public's Trust Director Michael Chamberlain, commenting on the previously released records, offered a considerably different assessment:
"The foundation of the COVID arm of the Censorship Industrial Complex during the Biden administration was their obsession with so-called 'misinformation.' But the tragically ironic part was that much of the actual misinformation was coming from inside their house."
The administration's behavior eventually landed in court. The Supreme Court punted in 2024, dismissing Murthy v. Missouri without touching the First Amendment questions at its core. A settlement reached afterward put some limits on the Surgeon General's office, CDC, and CISA, but narrow ones, and the constitutional questions remain unresolved.
But the latest documents leave little doubt about what officials were discussing behind closed doors. The Biden administration wanted technology companies to become more aggressive about controlling health-related speech, and its own staff recognized the political nature of the campaign.
Americans were told this was about protecting public health. The internal correspondence shows officials were willing to pressure private companies over what people could say, including speech extending well beyond the pandemic.
For an administration that spent so much time warning about threats to democracy, it certainly had an interesting approach to the First Amendment.