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New emails confirm Biden admin pressured Facebook into censoring COVID posts – LifeSite

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. House Judiciary Committee released new documents this week from Facebook parent company Meta shedding further light on the social network’s cooperation with the Biden administration to quash speech at odds with the positions of the federal government.

As detailed in recent news reports highlighted by the Committee Friday and two Twitter threads by Republican Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the subpoenaed documents “PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” according to Jordan.

Two internal Facebook emails from April 2021 reveal the company was “facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content,” and that one of President Joe Biden’s senior advisers, Andy Slavitt, was “outraged” by the platform’s refusal to take down a post predicting that in 10 years lawyers will be advertising on television to represent COVID vaccine injury cases.

The documents also contain private admissions that Facebook revised its COVID “misinformation” policies in direct response to pressure from the Biden administration:

Another email, from July 2021, states outright that Facebook removed content asserting that COVID was “manmade” specifically “because we were under pressure from the administration and others.”

“For many months, Meta has operated in good faith with this committee’s sweeping requests for information,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Forbes about the documents, and that the company “will continue to comply, as we have thus far, with good faith requests from the committee.”

“When asked about the investigation in a press conference Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration has ‘promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security’ and ‘consistently made clear that we believe social media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on American people,’” Forbes added.

In July 2021, LifeSiteNews reported on Biden declaring that Facebook was “killing people” by not censoring more COVID “misinformation” and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki acknowledging that the administration had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Last December, Jean-Pierre insisted that “we were not involved” in Facebook’s decision to suppress stories related to presidential son Hunter Biden’s lost computer.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisian Judge Terry Doughty issued a temporary injunction against Biden, Jean-Pierre, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and various cabinet secretaries and other federal officials from communicating with tech companies for the purpose of encouraging the suppression of specific user content on their platforms, prompting the cancellation of meetings between Facebook and the U.S. State Department (and likely among other agencies, as well). The administration is appealing the decision.

That injunction stemmed from a case spearheaded by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who say they have documents indicating that “dozens of federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies,” including DHS and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), were involved in a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise’” with the “intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.”

In another case currently pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is representing Mark Changizi, Michael Singer, and Daniel Kotzin, whose were suspended over tweets at odds with what at the time was the establishment view of the COVID-19 pandemic. They contend that Twitter was not merely exercising discretion over the use of its platform but rather acting in response to calls by government officials to quash dissenting COVID views, and particularly threats of new federal regulations if platforms did not take action on their own.

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