Senior Biden administration officials appear to have pressured Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to censor content the federal government deemed misinformation, according to federal government emails obtained by two Republican state attorneys general. .
The emails, procured in a federal lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, detail months of apparent coordination between federal officials and the social media giants on how to address information about COVID-19.
“The disclosure provided so far shows that this censorship enterprise is extremely broad,” Schmitt and Landry said in a joint statement. The lawsuit’s disclosure identified 45 federal officials who communicated with social media executives about what information should be censored.
The new revelations add to questions about whether it was appropriate for social media fact-checkers to censor opposing views, even within America’s scientific community.
Facebook, for example, put a “Missing Context” label on a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary that showed how social media companies put their finger on the scale in the scientific debate over COVID- 19. When asked, the social media giant’s fact-checkers said a team of three scientists disagreed with Dr. Makary. Although it’s not clear whether administration officials specifically interfered with Makary’s writing, the tweet and other posts were called out directly by the White House and removed by social media companies soon after.
In July of last year, Clarke Humphrey, the White House digital director of the COVID-19 response team, asked an Instagram employee to remove a parody account of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Can we take this off?” Humphrey wrote in an email. “It’s actually not one of ours.” Less than a minute later, the Instagram official responds: “Yes, yes!”
The relationship between the administration and social media workers indicated by email familiarity and response time was the product of multiple meetings between federal bureaucrats and social media companies.
An email from April 2021 discusses a planned meeting for Biden’s staff to be “briefed by Twitter on vaccine misinformation.” Later in the summer, a Facebook official proposed to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official that “in addition to our weekly meetings, we should have a monthly misinformation/disclosure meeting, perhaps on the subject of allegations that were communicated a few days ago so you can bring in matching experts and chat casually for 30 minutes or more.”
The CDC official replied, “Yes, we would like to do that.” The emails show multiple instances where Facebook officials would not proceed with censoring a COVID-19 claim until they received input from the administration’s “discrediting team.”
The emails also show social media companies eager to work with the administration. On July 16, 2021, President Joe Biden publicly accused Facebook of “murdering people” because the company had not removed misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. An executive at Meta (Facebook’s parent company) emailed Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to do damage control after the president’s statement.
“Extending a hand to what has happened… and culminating today with the President’s words for us”, writes the executive of Meta. “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us regarding the ongoing disinformation.”
The same Meta executive texted Murthy later that day. “It is not a wonderful thing to be accused of killing people,” he wrote, adding that he was “keen to find a way to reduce tension and work together cooperatively.”
The emails show he did just that. A week later, the Meta executive wrote to a Department of Health and Human Services official discussing changing the company’s policies and removing some objectionable pages, groups and accounts that were spreading what the administration had identified as misinformation.
The attorneys general’s lawsuit accuses the Biden administration of enacting a speech code that would be unconstitutional if the government tried to impose it on its own.
“By threatening and vilifying social media platforms for years to censor disfavored views and speakers from the left,” the lawsuit says, “senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with companies social media to oppress the disadvantaged. speakers, viewpoints and content on social media platforms under the Orwellian guise of banning so-called “misinformation”, “disinformation” and “misinformation”.
Earlier this summer, the Justice Department refused to produce communications between federal government bureaucrats and social media officials. So the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed a petition in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to compel the federal government to produce the emails.
The court ruled in favor of the petition that resulted in the recently published email group. However, the Justice Department is claiming “executive privilege” for communications between top Biden administration officials and the social media giants.
“The government has been uncooperative and resisted complying with the discovery order at every turn,” said a statement from the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is a party to the lawsuit against the federal government.
The lawsuit’s revelations have raised concerns among Republicans.
“Confirming that this is the most dangerous anti-free speech administration in American history AND that Facebook (or Meta or whatever) is nothing but an appendage of the deep state,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., posted on his Twitter account.
House Republicans are proposing legislation to stop the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor content. The Speech Protection from Government Interference Act would prohibit federal bureaucrats and other executive branch officials from encouraging private companies to censor or restrict speech.
