A trio of House Republicans asked President Biden on Tuesday to provide records of communications and meetings between the executive branch and social media giants Facebook and Twitter over so-called “disinformation” on those platforms.
“We remain concerned with your administration’s efforts to pressure private companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor certain speech or silence individuals with whom you disagree,” read the letter, led by Committee member of House Energy and Commerce Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and obtained exclusively by The Post.
The mission comes a week after a federal judge in Louisiana ordered the White House to turn over emails that press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top officials were sent to social media companies.
The order by US District Judge Terry Doughty was in response to a lawsuit filed by Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana, arguing that the Biden administration colluded with Facebook and Twitter to “censor free speech.” on a variety of topics, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the election.
“We know that administration officials and federal bureaucrats asked these companies to censor legitimate news and public discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic under the guise of combating misinformation, disinformation and election interference,” Tuesday’s letter said. which later adds: We are writing to express our continued concern with the conduct of your administration and federal agencies and to request documents and information related to these reports.”
The requests outlined in the letter, which was also signed by Reps. Robert Latta (R-Ohio) and Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), include records of meetings between executive branch officials and Facebook and Twitter employees.
Lawmakers are also seeking “logs and information” about communications about individual Facebook and Twitter users, as well as “disinformation” or “disinformation” content.”
Lawmakers gave Biden until Sept. 26 to submit the requested documents, a day before Doughty’s deadline for the administration to turn over its emails in response to the lawsuit.
In a filing last month, Landry and Schmitt charged that “dozens of federal officials in at least eleven federal agencies” engaged in a massive and widespread federal “Censorship Enterprise” with “the purpose and effect of pressuring social media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials do not like.”
The document included a July 16, 2021, email from an unidentified Facebook official to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, which read in part: “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us regarding the ongoing misinformation. “
Seven days later, on July 23, the same Facebook official proudly informed officials at the Department of Health and Human Services that the company was taking action against a group called the “misinformation dozen” for their posts about COVID-19 vaccines. 19.
“[W]removed 17 pages, groups and other Instagram accounts associated with the disinfo dozen (so a total of 39 profiles, pages, groups and IG accounts have been deleted so far, resulting in each member of the disinfo dozen having removed at least such an entity) ,” the email read, later adding: “We also expanded the set of false claims we remove to keep up with recent misinformation trends we’re seeing.”
Five days after that, an email from a Facebook official to a contact at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposes that “in addition to our weekly meetings, we do a monthly misinformation/disclosure meeting, with perhaps some of the claim topics communicated days ago. that you can bring in matchmaking experts and chat casually for 30 minutes or more.”
“Yes, we would like to do that,” the CDC official replied.
State AGs said last month that they have identified at least 45 people within the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security alone who communicated with social media companies about “misinformation.”
They also claim that officials from other agencies, including the Census Bureau, the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, the State Department, and the Treasury Department were at least aware of the “Censorship Enterprise.”
Landry and Schmitt also claimed that Facebook’s parent company Meta had acknowledged that at least 32 government officials, including workers at the FDA, the US Election Assistance Commission and the White House, had communicated with the company about content moderation — contacts that were not disclosed by the White House.
