In early 2021, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon were frustrated by the Biden administration’s “pressure” to censor and demote content related to COVID-19 vaccines and the origins of the virus.
But the platforms ultimately caved to senior White House officials and not only removed and demoted posts and other content but 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,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said.
The Ohio Republican chronicled the Biden pressure campaign in a new 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 Biden administration soon after the president 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 one July 2021 email, Rob Flaherty, who was President Biden’s director of digital strategy, pushed YouTube executives to more aggressively censor content that questioned the safety of COVID vaccinations. The objectionable content flagged by the White House featured 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 responded to Mr. Flaherty that the content did not violate “our community guidelines.”
But YouTube and other social media outlets were determined to remain in good standing with the Biden administration, in part because of the looming threat they could lose their federally granted immunity from lawsuits over the content they post.
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.”
They ran the changes by the White House for approval and “feedback,” emails show, and Mr. Flaherty responded that he’d love to meet with the YouTube team about the new policy, which he said. “at first blush, 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, citing “criticism from the Biden people.”
According to House investigators, 43 Amazon products, presumably vaccination-related books, were immediately flagged.
Over at Meta the parent company of Facebook, executives were frustrated by Mr. Biden’s pressure campaign and public accusation, emails show.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, wrote to other top company executives suggesting Facebook should reveal the White House “put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory.”
Top Facebook execs were fuming over public accusations by the White House that they were responsible for COVID-19 deaths.
According to an email from Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg, the Facebook team believed they were “doing a decent job” curbing COVID misinformation on the platform under pressure from Mr. Biden’s lieutenants, including the censorship of the Wuhan lab leak theory.
At least that is what White House officials were telling them internally.
But on July 16, 2021, Mr. Biden threw Facebook under the bus, declaring social media platforms, including Facebook and other companies 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 fumed in an email sent the same day as Mr. Biden’s remarks.
At the time, Mr. Biden was struggling to lift sagging vaccination numbers, which began plummeting amid reports of side effects and lack of efficacy.
Administration officials blamed social media, citing a March report by the non-profit 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.”
At Meta, top executives grappled with how to respond to Mr. Biden’s public grenade, believing they had already worked aggressively to censure content under pressure from the Biden administration. For example, 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 pandemic response advisor, 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 the 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. But just a few weeks later, Facebook developed new and “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 interfering 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 new report and flipped the accusations on the GOP, which has spent millions of dollars investigating social media platforms. Democrats say the extensive probe 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,” Del. Stacey Plaskett, Virgin Islands Democrat, said at a recent hearing about the new 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 report concluded 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.”