The Biden censorship campaign

 Tablet:

In July of 2021, Meta’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, emailed Brian Rice, who was on the Public Policy team, asking why the company had removed from Facebook, rather than demoted or flagged, claims that COVID-19 was “man-made.” Rice responded, “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more and it was part of the ‘more’ package.” He concluded his reply to Clegg with an acknowledgment of error: “We shouldn’t have done it.”

These emails make clear that the company had removed posts discussing the lab leak theory not pursuant to their own judgment and policies, but because the Biden administration pressured them to do so. This is a remarkable set of facts, given that in the two years that have passed since that exchange, the lab leak theory has gained credibility in mainstream circles, including within the Biden administration. In direct opposition to their 2021 edicts calling it “misinformation,” the Biden administration recently halted funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology over concerns that the COVID-19 virus originated there.

The discovery of Clegg’s and Rice’s emails—along with a number of other internal Meta documents the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government obtained late last month—was a pivotal development in what has turned into a yearslong investigation of unconstitutional federal government entanglements in social media platforms’ content moderation.

A case known as Missouri v. Biden has been driving the litigation component of this inquiry. The plaintiffs allege that various federal agencies and the White House pressured, coerced, and encouraged platforms to censor certain disfavored views on subjects including COVID-19, the 2020 election, and the Hunter Biden laptop story, in violation of the First Amendment. While other lawsuits alleging First Amendment violations based on government involvement in social media censorship have been filed over the past two years, Missouri has proven uniquely successful. Originally brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, individual plaintiffs, including co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, joined the lawsuit.

When the complaint was filed in May of 2022, the main proof the Missouri plaintiffs had were public statements from high-ranking members of the administration, including former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and President Biden himself. The plaintiffs cited public statements of government officials unabashedly proclaiming they were flagging posts for social media companies to censor; openly criticizing the companies for inadequate removal of content (especially anything that cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines); accusing tech executives of “killing people” for not adequately censoring so-called misinformation; and threatening to hold them accountable should they refuse to comply.

Judge Terrence Doughty ordered discovery at an early stage of litigation in Missouri v. Biden, allowing the plaintiffs to acquire documents and take depositions that substantiated their claims. For the first time, the public became aware of the Biden administration’s clandestine censorship operation, which began a mere three days after President Biden’s inauguration. White House Digital Director Clarke Humphrey wrote an email to Twitter with the subject line “Flagging Hank Aaron misinfo” that said: “Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” The tweet had been written by current Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and suggested that the legendary baseball player had died as a result of side effects from the COVID-19 vaccine. Humphrey continued: “And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same ~genre that would be great.” Within minutes, Twitter responded without resistance: “We recently escalated this.”

By February of 2021, then-White House Director of Digital Media Robert Flaherty had intensified the administration’s tactics to achieve bold censorship aims. He began bullying companies—using expletives, wielding accusations, and making demands—in his efforts to get them to remove content that he claimed might cause people to decline vaccines. Andy Slavitt, former White House senior adviser for the COVID-19 response, took a page out of his colleague’s playbook, condemning Meta for failing to adequately censor posts that might stoke vaccine hesitancy. He ended his email with an ominous, barely veiled threat: “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.”
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The evils of censorship are starting to be revealed.  In many cases, those doing the censoring were just wrong on many levels.  It is almost always better to just tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.