The Biden Administration Censored Covid Vax Sceptics By Chris Knight (Florida)
During the Covid freak-out period, by July 2021, the Biden administration had got the message through to Facebook, that the regime wanted Facebook to remove all “content that provides any negative information on or opinions about the vaccine.” And, that they did, censoring even posts they they felt should not have ben censored. “We were under pressure from the administration,” a Facebook employee emailed to Nick Clegg, a senior company executive, after he asked why the company had censored the Covid lab leak theory. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
Well, that they say now, now that things are starting to unravel, and the Covid narrative is being deconstructed. But the main thing the Biden regime was keen to censor were discussions of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, and posts suggesting this got removed to please the White House. We must then ask why the US moved to protect communist China, and the answer, as Robert Kenney Jr has shown, is that the US was funding the gain-of-function research there on the coronaviruses, which were then either accidentally, or deliberately leaked. The CCP must have seen a grand opportunity to launch an attack upon the West, one which the Americans had funded.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-white-house-efforts-to-censor
“By July 2021, Biden Administration pressure to censor Covid vaccine skeptics had grown so harsh Facebook executives believed the administration wanted the company to remove any “content that provides any negative information on or opinions about the vaccine.”
And Facebook’s executives admitted internally that intimidation from the White House had caused the company to censor posts that it should have allowed.
“We were under pressure from the administration,” a Facebook employee emailed to Nick Clegg, a senior company executive, after he asked why the company had censored the Covid lab leak theory. “We shouldn’t have done it.”—
The Facebook documents reveal a White House completely unconcerned with the First Amendment implications of its censorship efforts.
For months, senior White House officials, led by Andy Slavitt, had demanded that the company remove posts they did not like, the emails show. The pressure only increased in July and August 2021, as the mRNA jabs failed, Delta Covid infections accelerated, and the White House began to consider very divisive vaccine mandates.
The documents were released Thursday and Friday by the Congressional committee investigating government efforts to censor social media.
Facebook had been slow to turn over the documents but did so after committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened to hold Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress. Jordan then posted them on Twitter in two threads Thursday and Friday.
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(Don’t you dare joke about the Covid vaccines! The White House told us the First Amendment doesn’t cover Covid vaccine jokes, and they would know.)
The files also show that despite their concerns about the pressure they faced to censor truthful information, Facebook executives wanted to keep the White House happy in the summer of 2021.
Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs (and a former British deputy prime minister), emailed other executives that Sheryl Sandberg - at the time Facebook’s chief operating officer - wanted the company “to show that we are trying to be responsive to the WH.”
If the company did not bend, it faced “protracted and increasing animosity” with the White House at a time when it had “bigger fish to fry with the Administration,” Clegg wrote. “That doesn’t seem a great place for us to be.”
In other words, a senior Facebook executive said the company might give into unconstitutional censorship demands because the federal government had other levers on it. Ultimately, Facebook did knuckle to the pressure and significantly increased its censorship and suppression of vaccine-skeptical posts.
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Jordan referred to the documents as the “Facebook Files,” a reference to the “Twitter Files” - Elon Musk’s voluntary partial opening of Twitter’s internal documents to a handful of journalists.
But the new documents are arguably more significant than anything in the Twitter Files, because they include discussions from Facebook’s top officials about the White House censorship efforts.
Musk has not made similar documents from Twitter’s senior management public, although they exist. Twitter’s own lawyers referred to them in August 2022 as part of the settlement of Berenson v. Twitter, my lawsuit against Twitter for its ban of me in August 2021.”
“Facebook removed content related to COVID-19 under pressure from the White House, including posts claiming the virus was man-made, according to internal company communications leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
“Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man made,” Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, asked in a July 2021 email to colleagues.
According to the outlet, a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy responded: “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” referencing the Biden administration.
“We shouldn’t have done it,” the VP added.
The emails were exchanged around August 2021 — three months after Facebook reversed its ban on posts asserting COVID-19 was man-made.
The flip-flip came more than a year after the social-media giant banned a well-reasoned Post opinion column by China scholar Steven Mosher speculated about a potential lab leak. More than a year later, Mosher still hasn’t had his account reinstated.
Another email viewed by The Journal was circulated the month prior, after Biden accused platforms like Facebook of “killing people” by allowing so-called “misinformation” to propagate unchecked.
In July 2021, the Facebook VP circulated a memo assessing the difference between Facebook’s content policies and the Biden administration’s demands — some of which the Meta-owned company appeared ready to push back on.
“There is likely a significant gap between what the WH would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing,” the Facebook executive wrote.
One request Facebook was ready to reject, the VP suggested: The White House’s desire that the company take action against humorous or satirical content that suggested the vaccines aren’t safe, according to The Journal.
“The WH 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 VP wrote.
Clegg responded: “I can’t see Mark [Zuckerberg] in a million years being comfortable with removing that — and I wouldn’t recommend it.”
According to The Journal, emails showed discussions surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a 2024 presidential candidate and notorious vaccine skeptic who had his Instagram account revoked over its COVID-related content but not his Facebook account, as it didn’t contain the same type of posts.
These emails, along with a number of other related internal messages, were reportedly also obtained by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating what GOP lawmakers claim is the Biden administration’s unlawful censoring of users on social media.
Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana brought the lawsuit last year, alleging that the Biden administration fostered a sprawling “federal censorship enterprise” that pressured social-media platforms to scrub away dissenting views, including criticism of mask mandates and objections to COVID-19 vaccination.
In response to the suit, which claims the government violated the First Amendment, the Justice Department filed a nearly 300-page brief denying the allegations.”
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