Never before seen emails from within Facebook obtained by the House Judiciary Committee led by chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) have shed further light on how the White House and Biden appointed government officials pressured the tech giant to infringe on the First Amendment rights of Americans.
Facebook initially resisted the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of internal communications about White House pressure, leading the Committee to schedule a vote to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress if his company did not turn over the documents.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by guards ( Chip Somodevilla /Getty)
After this threat of Congressional censure, Facebook appears to have turned over the require documents, which reveal more of the Biden administration’s furious pressure campaign against the company to suppress discussion about important issues affecting Americans.
Rep. Jordan posted the material in a long thread earlier today:
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.”
But it wasn’t just the White House.
Facebook also changed its policies in direct response to pressure from Biden’s Surgeon General, censoring members of the “disinformation dozen.” pic.twitter.com/FvGuoqUlns
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
Rep. Jordan also revealed that the White House demanded to know why Facebook had not censored a clip from Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. In response, Facebook 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.”
Jordan also revealed that the U.S. Surgeon General also intervened to ask why Facebook had not censored the so-called “disinformation dozen” — a group of accounts questioning official COVID-19 policy.
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.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
The Judiciary Committee chairman also noted how difficult it was to obtain 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.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.