Newly disclosed emails from within Facebook (now known as Meta) reveal that the Biden administration and its appointed officials exerted significant pressure on the tech giant. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook frequently bent the knee to the White House demands, such as one case in which emails state executives were “ready to tell the White House that it had demoted a video posted by Tucker Carlson by 50% in response to the White House’s demands, even though the post didn’t violate any policies.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that according to recently made public emails from Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, the Biden administration and its appointees put a lot of pressure on the company, possibly infringing on Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Tucker Carlson speaks at the Turning Point Action conference on July 15, 2023 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Trump is scheduled to speak at the event held in the Palm Beach County Convention Center. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
US President Joe Biden speaks about the creation of new manufacturing jobs at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, on April 25, 2023. – Biden announced Tuesday his bid “to finish the job” with re-election in 2024. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
The company initially resisted the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena for internal communications about White House pressure. This resistance prompted the Committee to schedule a vote to hold Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, in contempt of Congress if his company did not comply.
However, the threat of Congressional censure led to Facebook turning over the required documents. These documents expose the extent of the Biden administration’s pressure campaign against the company to suppress discussions on important issues affecting Americans.
The internal communications, which include emails from high-ranking Facebook executives, shed light on how the company managed user posts about the origins of the pandemic. “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.
In response, a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration, stated, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”
In one stunning case, the White House also reportedly requested to know why Facebook did not delete footage from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, according to the emails. Facebook responded by saying it was “ready to tell the White House that it had demoted a video posted by Tucker Carlson by 50% in response to the White House’s demands, even though the post didn’t violate any policies.”
Rep. Jordan also revealed that the U.S. Surgeon General intervened to ask why Facebook had not censored the so-called “disinformation dozen” — a group of accounts questioning official COVID-19 policy.
Rep. Jordan posted the material in a Twitter thread:
In April 2021, a Facebook employee circulated an email for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, writing: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House” to remove posts.
In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post.
When Clegg “countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” Slavitt disregarded the warning and the First Amendment.
What happened next? Facebook panicked. In another April 2021 email, Brian Rice, Facebook’s VP of public policy, raised the concern that Slavitt’s challenge felt “very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days.”
But Facebook wanted to repair its relationship with the White House to avoid adverse action: “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House], and our internal methods too.”
Rep. Jordan noted the difficulty in obtaining the information from Facebook. “Only after the Committee announced its intention to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt did Facebook produce ANY internal documents to the Committee, including these documents, which PROVE that government pressure was directly responsible for censorship on Facebook,” said Jordan.
The White House, however, has defended its actions, stating that its discussions were aimed at promoting the adoption of vaccines and other public-health goals. “We have consistently made it clear that we believe social-media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on the American people, while making independent decisions about the content of their platforms,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a Thursday press briefing.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan