YouTube, Facebook and Amazon were frustrated in early 2021 by the Biden administration’s “pressure” to censor and demote content related to COVID-19 vaccines and the origins of the coronavirus.
The platforms ultimately removed and demoted posts and other content and collaborated with the White House on company censorship policy proposals.
“The Biden White House censorship campaign was so intrusive that Big Tech felt the need to run policy proposals by them,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican.
Mr. Jordan chronicled the Biden pressure campaign in a report based on thousands of emails and other documents obtained by the Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on the weaponization of government.
The report details the coerced collaboration between social media and the administration soon after President Biden took office.
At the time, top Biden staffers were determined to quash online voices who disagreed with pandemic-related lockdowns and vaccine policies and to remove content that questioned the administration’s insistence that the virus did not come from a lab in Wuhan, China.
White House officials browbeat top social media outlets to play their part.
In a July 2021 email, Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s director of digital strategy, pushed YouTube executives to more aggressively censor content that questioned the safety of COVID vaccinations. The White House flagged content featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a clip of Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, speaking at a congressional hearing about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
“I think we had a pretty extensive back and forth about the degree to which you all are recommending anti-vaccination content,” Mr. Flaherty wrote to YouTube in a message citing the content. “This seems to indicate that you are. What is going on here?”
YouTube told Mr. Flaherty that the content did not violate “our community guidelines.”
YouTube and other social media outlets were determined to remain in good standing with the Biden administration, partly because of the looming threat that they could lose their federally granted immunity from lawsuits over posted content.
YouTube ultimately stepped up its censorship efforts to please the Biden administration. In September 2021, the platform formulated a more aggressive policy to “remove content that could mislead people on the safety and efficacy of vaccines.”
The video-sharing platform ran the changes by the White House for approval and “feedback,” emails show. Mr. Flaherty indicated that he wanted to meet with the YouTube team about the policy. “At first blush,” he said, it “seems like a great step.”
Amazon, the world’s largest online bookseller, faced similar pressure from the Biden administration over books questioning COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy.
In March 2021, after receiving a critical email from a top White House official about anti-vaccine books, the company immediately created a “do not promote” policy for those books because of “criticism from the Biden people.”
House investigators said 43 Amazon products, presumably vaccination-related books, were immediately flagged.
At Meta, the parent company of Facebook, executives were frustrated by Mr. Biden’s pressure campaign, emails show.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, wrote to other top company executives suggesting Facebook should reveal that the White House “put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory.”
Top executives were fuming over the White House’s public accusations that Facebook was responsible for COVID-19 deaths.
According to an email from Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg, Facebook officials thought they were “doing a decent job” curbing COVID-19 misinformation on the platform under pressure from Mr. Biden’s lieutenants, including the censorship of the Wuhan lab leak theory.
That was what White House officials were telling them internally.
On July 16, 2021, Mr. Biden declared that social media platforms, including Facebook, were “killing people” by allowing “outrageous misinformation” about the virus and vaccines on their platforms.
Facebook executives were furious.
“The behavior of the White House over the last 24 hours has been highly cynical and dishonest,” Mr. Clegg said in an email sent the same day.
At the time, vaccination numbers were sagging amid reports of side effects and lack of efficacy.
Administration officials cited a March report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate that found “leading anti-vaxxers,” among them Mr. Kennedy, now a presidential candidate, were responsible for 73% of the anti-vaccination content.
The center recommended “de-platforming repeat offenders” to end “the proliferation of dangerous misinformation.”
Meta executives grappled with a response to Mr. Biden’s public grenade. They began removing posts about the lab leak theory and content questioning the vaccine in February 2021. Still, the company faced continued pressure to “do more” from the Biden administration’s pandemic response adviser, Andy Slavitt.
Mr. Slavitt warned Facebook in March that the administration was “considering our options on what to do” in response to Facebook’s resistance to removing anti-vaccination and other content because of free speech concerns.
In the July 16 email exchange with Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Clegg, Meta Platforms CEO Sheryl Sandberg said “the best narrative” for the company was that Biden administration officials “are scapegoating us to cover their own missed vaccination rates and a virus they can’t get control of through public policy.”
Mr. Zuckerberg told the Facebook team not to bow to pressure from the government and change its policies. A few weeks later, however, Facebook developed “more aggressive” content moderation policies in response to “continued criticism of our approach from the administration.”
Mr. Jordan said the documents showcase the Biden administration’s interference with free expression on social media.
“Facebook knew the White House wanted them to censor, but they didn’t exactly know what or how much,” Mr. Jordan said.
Democrats rejected the report and flipped the accusations onto congressional Republicans, who have spent millions of dollars investigating social media platforms. Democrats say the extensive investigation is aimed at discouraging social media platforms from moderating election-related misinformation.
“This is about them intimidating social media companies to stop engaging in moderating content before the 2024 election,” Delegate Stacey E. Plaskett, Virgin Islands Democrat, said at a recent hearing about the report. “Targeted and harassed by this committee, they are afraid to do their jobs, they are afraid to speak up, they are afraid to do their work on those very same platforms.”
The House Judiciary Committee report concluded that the Biden administration was responsible for intimidating the platforms by squelching free debate over pandemic policies, many of which have been criticized and questioned.
“Because public health measures could not be fairly debated by the public and assessed on their merits, the Biden administration and other policymakers imposed public health measures that were devastating to schoolchildren, workers, and other Americans around the country,” the report concluded. “Today, it is widely accepted how foolish these measures were.”
House Republicans have introduced legislation to rein in government-sponsored censorship on social media. The bills include the Free Speech Protection Act and the Censorship Accountability Act, which lawmakers said will “hold federal employees accountable for violating Americans’ First Amendment rights.”
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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