by Tyler O’Neil, Daily Signal:
Facebook told an official at the Biden White House that the Big Tech company not only suppressed misinformation but took action against the “virality” of “often-true content” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey released the documents earlier this week. Bailey obtained them through a court case, Missouri v. Biden, alleging that some of President Joe Biden’s top officials “colluded with Big Tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment.”
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“I want to protect Missourians and the freedoms they enjoy, which is why as attorney general, I will always defend the Constitution,” Bailey told The Daily Signal in an email Thursday. “This case is about the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with.”
“I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate,” the Missouri attorney general pledged.
In an email to the White House dated March 21, 2021, a Facebook staff member discussed “levers for tackling vaccine hesitancy content” with Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, and Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy.
“You also asked us about our levers for reducing virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” wrote the Facebook staffer, whose identity was redacted. “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable information. This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level because it is important for people to be able to discuss both their personal experiences and concerns about the vaccine, but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.”
“We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content,” the Facebook staffer added. He or she then promised, “More on this front as we proceed to implement.”
In this email to the White House, the Facebook representative admitted to preventing exposure of content that doesn’t violate Facebook’s policies—content that isn’t “actionable.” The staffer also suggested that the White House had asked Facebook to take these measures.
In an April 22, 2021, email, Flaherty told Google staff that the White House remains “concerned that Youtube [sic] is ‘funneling’ people into hesitance and intensifying people’s hesitancy. We certainly recognize that removing content that is unfavorable to the cause of increasing vaccine adoption is not a realistic—or even good—solution.”
The White House’s digital strategy chief added that combating vaccine hesitancy “is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH [White House],” an apparent reference to the president himself.
