The Biden administration has partnered with social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to censor what they call “misinformation” about topics including the COVID-19 pandemic, two Republican state attorneys general said as they pushed for the release of emails between the top executive branch. authorities and Big Tech titans.
State Attorney General Jeff Landry and his Missouri counterpart, Eric Schmidt, accused “dozens of federal officials in eleven federal agencies” of engaging in a “vast and extensive federal ‘censorship enterprise'” in a complaint filed Wednesday in Louisiana federal court. “The Purpose and Effects of Federal Authorities’ Pressure to Censor and Suppress Private Speech on Social Media Platforms They Dislike.”
The Biden administration has not been shy about relying on social media companies to police their content. In the year On July 15, 2021, then-White House press secretary Jane Psaki said colleagues were “reporting problematic posts to Facebook that spread misinformation.”
“It’s important to act quickly on harmful posts … and Facebook must move quickly to remove harmful infringing posts,” Psaki added at the time.
The next day, Biden accused platforms like Facebook of “killing people” by allowing so-called “misinformation” to spread unchecked.
Shortly after Biden’s comments, an anonymous Facebook official sent an email to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that read in part: “I know our teams met today to better understand the extent of the misinformation the White House is expecting from us.”
Seven days later, On July 23, the same Facebook official proudly announced that officials from the Department of Health and Human Services were cracking down on what the company called “misinformation” in posts about COVID-19 vaccines.
“[W]e 17 additional pages, groups and Instagram accounts linked to Disinfo Dozen (a total of 39 profiles, pages, groups and IG accounts have been deleted, resulting in at least one member of each Disinfo Dozen member removed),” the email read, followed by “additional misinformation we have seen recently. We have expanded the team of false claims that we will remove to track,” he said.
The connection is so convenient that on July 20, 2021, when Clark Humphrey, digital director of the White House’s Covid-19 response team, asked about taking down the fake Instagram account of Dr. Anthony Facci, he received a response from Facebook within seconds.
“Hello – any way to get rid of this?” Humphrey wrote with a link to the account. “Not really one of ours.”
“Yes, on it!” The answer came back.
Another email, from April 2021, shows a planned meeting for White House staff to “debunk vaccine misinformation on Twitter.” Yet another report, from July 28 of the same year, suggested that a Facebook official submit to his CDC counterpart that “in addition to our weekly meetings, we could hold a monthly misinformation/disinformation meeting, possibly working on topics covered a few days ago.” Bring relevant experts and have a quiet chat for 30 minutes.”
“Yes, we would like to do that,” replied the CDC official.
“We’ve already received several documents that show the federal government has close ties to social media companies and clearly coordinate to investigate free speech, but we’re not done,” Schmidt said in a statement Thursday.
“The Department of Justice is sheltering behind executive privilege and has refused to turn over communications between top Biden administration officials and social media companies. That is why we asked the court yesterday to compel the Department of Justice to release those records. We’re just getting started – stay tuned!
The AGs identified at least 45 people at HHS and the Department of Homeland Security alone who communicated with social media companies about “misinformation.” In addition, officials from other agencies, including the Census Bureau, the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, the State Department and the Treasury Department, say they at least know about the “censorship enterprise.”
In addition to the document dump, Meta also announced that at least 32 officials, including staff from the FDA, the U.S. Election Commission and the White House, spoke with the company about content moderation — but those communications were not disclosed in government disclosures. , Landry and Schmitt said. YouTube said it contacted 11 officials, some of whom were not identified by the government, in response to the lawsuit, the AGs said.
