Communications released by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that Facebook was coerced into censoring posts pertaining to COVID-19.
One email stated, “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” Facebook’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg asked.
The social media platform’s vice president of content policy responded, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more.”
They also admitted, “We shouldn’t have done it.”
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said, “These documents begin to reveal the pressure that Facebook and other social-media companies were under to alter their content-moderation policies and remove protected speech to appease the federal government, particularly the Biden White House.”
Three months before the July 2021 email communications, Facebook parent company Meta said it would end censorship, as there was “increasing debate about the virus’s origin.”
“There is likely a significant gap between what the [White House] would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing,” the Facebook vice president said in an email, citing the White House’s idea to remove satirical posts about the vaccine.
“The [White House] has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed if it is premised on the vaccine having side effects, so we expect it would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed,” the email read.
Reporting from Free Beacon:
In another July email to colleagues just before a meeting with the U.S. surgeon general about vaccine misinformation, Clegg wrote: "My sense is that our current course—in effect explaining ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the lines … is a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony." "Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration—data flows etc.—that doesn’t seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns," he said.
