The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed that Amazon censored books that expressed skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) relayed the findings on X, describing that Amazon faced pressure from the White House to suppress the materials.
On March 2, 2021, senior Biden White House official Andy Slavitt wrote in an email, “Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of Amazon?”
Slavitt noted, “If you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up. I haven’t looked beyond that but if that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”
Jordan shared on X, “Initially, Amazon decided to hold off on ‘doing a manual intervention’ to censor books,” adding, “Why? Not out of any commitment to free speech, but because doing so would be ‘too visible’ to the American public and likely to spur criticism from conservative media.”
An individual from Amazon responded to the email, explaining that it believes “retailers are different than social media communities.”
“As a retailer, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable,” Amazon added. “All booksellers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer and we do not take selection decisions lightly.”
Amazon later met with Biden administration officials, Jordan explained, because they were “feeling pressure from the White House” to take action on “books related to vaccine misinformation.”
The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government also revealed in November, alongside the House Judiciary Committee, an interim report titled, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Free Speech.”
The report details how the federal government partnered with Stanford University and other groups to create the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to censor speech leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
“The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly limits the government’s role in monitoring and censoring Americans’ speech, but these disinformation researchers (often funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars) were not strictly bound by these constitutional guardrails,” reads a summary of the report. “What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex.”
