The Biden administration pressured Facebook into removing content related to COVID-19, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Specifically, internal communications reveal that the censorship effort focused on posts claiming the virus was manmade. This report comes as a part of Congressional Republicans’ larger effort to shed light on the government restricting free speech on social media platforms.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan began the effort on Thursday, releasing what he calls “The Facebook Files”—likely in reference to “the Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk and a group of journalists last year—to provide proof of the censorship. Part One of the exposé contained screenshots and excerpts of documents but did not show the full correspondence. However, the lengthy thread ended with “to be continued,” teasing more to come.
THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE
🧵 Thread:
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
Part Two of the Facebook Files, which dropped on Friday morning, came via the Wall Street Journal’s analysis of internal documents released to Congress by Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
THE FACEBOOK FILES PART 2.
Newly subpoenaed documents reveal Facebook bowed to the Biden White House’s pressure to remove posts.
🧵 Thread: https://t.co/vOgRkBNFmW
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 28, 2023
According to the report, emails from Facebook executives show how the social media site handled government content control requests:
“Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man made?” asked Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president of global affairs, in July 2021. An unidentified company vice president replied: “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more…We shouldn’t have done it.”
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This exchange took place three months after Facebook reversed its pandemic-era policy of deleting content questioning the origins of COVID-19 or pushing the “lab leak theory.”
A separate email from the month prior further addressed the mounting pressure from the Biden administration amid the nationwide push to reach 90% vaccination rates. At the time, President Joe Biden stated that online misinformation was causing vaccine hesitancy and was responsible for “killing people.”
“The WH has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed if it is premised on the vaccine having side effects, so we expect it would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed,” a Facebook vice president wrote. Subsequent emails show Facebook employees questioning whether this censorship effort would only increase hesitancy and further fuel conspiracy theories.
Additional attention was given to censoring specific individuals, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time outspoken skeptic of vaccines. Kennedy’s Instagram account was banned following anti-vaccine posts, but his Facebook was kept active despite the two platforms both being Meta subsidiaries. The list of people who were specifically silenced also included journalists from the New York Post and other similar outlets.
“While these documents are jarring, they are just the beginning of the story,” Rep. Jordan said on Thursday. His comments came just after he canceled a committee vote on whether Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be held in contempt of Congress. The company’s compliance in turning over documents and providing testimony has prevented such a measure thus far, but Jordan intends to keep leveraging that vote to get more information. “We expect Facebook to continue to produce documents, and if not, contempt remains on the table.”
In response to this report, Democrats are arguing that the Biden administration did what it had to do to save lives and maintain order during the worst of the pandemic, and they accuse Republicans of attacking private companies’ right to regulate content on their platforms.
Just like with Part One, Part Two of the Facebook Files ended with an ominous “to be continued”…meaning there is likely much more still to be revealed.
To be continued…
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 28, 2023
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