Facebook Email Leaks Show Massive Pressure by Biden's Regime to Censor COVID Information

According to internal emails revealed to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook routinely cooperated with the Biden White House and other officials to remove COVID information that was counter to messages and policies being pushed by the government. The emails show an intense effort to restrict COVID-related conversations and show that Facebook continued to censor conversations even after saying it had stopped.

The emails show Facebook executives discussing how they managed users’ posts about the origins of a pandemic that the administration was seeking to control. “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” asked Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, in a July 2021 email to colleagues.

“We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it.”

The discussion took place three months after Facebook, which is owned by Meta Platforms, decided to stop banning posts asserting that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, in light of increasing debate about the virus’s origin.

The documents show that where Facebook held a line on removing memes, cartoons, and humorous posts about the vaccine despite Biden’s thugs insisting that mocking government policy was dangerous, they also show that the company was well aware that substantial resistance on their part would be harmful.

At the same time, Facebook officials appeared to feel pressure to address the White House’s concerns. As Clegg prepared to meet the U.S. surgeon general about vaccine misinformation in late July 2021, he emailed colleagues: “My sense is that our current course—in effect explaining ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the lines…is a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony.”

“Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration—data flows etc—that doesn’t seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns,” he said.

That view seems to have carried the day with Facebook, Meta, or whatever it calls itself this week.

By August 2021, Facebook executives were emailing each other about new planned changes to their Covid content policies. One change increased the punishments faced by users who ran afoul of content policies and had accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, another social-media platform owned by Meta, the emails show.

For example, the company had previously removed the Instagram account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , a vaccine skeptic now turned presidential candidate. But his Facebook account hadn’t faced the same punishment because it hadn’t posted the same content, the emails show.

Under the new policy, Kennedy’s Facebook account wouldn’t be recommended to other users, a Facebook executive explained in an August email describing how the company was following up on the Biden administration’s requests.

Jim Jordan covered some of the emails in a hearing this week, and my colleague Ward Clark covered it in detail in The Facebook Files: How the Biden Administration Cracked Down on Free Speech. This video is a good summary; turn the volume off if you’re not into porn soundtracks.

This hearing and leaked emails couldn’t come at a worse time for the Biden cabal. A federal judge has issued a scathing indictment of the government using private companies to censor online speech; see Federal Judge Destroys the Government’s Argument in Favor of Censorship and Educates Them on the First Amendment.

See other RedState posts on the fight against censorship:

Even though the Fifth Circuit judge issued a stay to his injunction forbidding the government to coordinate with social media platforms over content moderation (Fifth Circuit Stays Injunction Forbidding Government Censorship via Social Media Platforms), the facts revealed in the WSJ story, and by Jordan’s subcommittee, show the trial court was correct. The government was using threats against the companies in other areas to coerce them into complying with censorship demands.