The truth is out; the cat is out of the bag; the king is not wearing any clothes. Name your saying, but they all mean the same. What we all knew was true has finally been proven. The White House has been censoring information about Covid-19 that didn’t conform to their political agenda.
This is business as usual in authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea – but it isn’t supposed to happen in the United States! The State isn’t supposed to control the news – and especially it isn’t supposed to control scientific debate. Yet that’s exactly what has been happening in America for the last two years.
Censorship by high tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have been widely reported in the media, thanks especially to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. We’ve been receiving regular releases of Twitter emails disclosing the deliberate effort to suppress Covid and other information that didn’t conform to liberal ideology. But now we’re learning of the collusion between these companies and the White House.
Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tell us that newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House – not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
On March 14, 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy,” as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period. We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
At this point, Facebook should have told the White House to stay out of their business. That’s what happens in a free democracy. But in authoritarian regimes, business must tow the government line or risk being put out of business. It’s not clear here whether Facebook wilted under the pressure or simply cooperated with a government who shares their political ideology. But the White House has no business pressuring Facebook to carry their political agenda.
What is known is that Facebook sent an email on March 21, detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” Facebook characterized this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”
The problem here goes beyond the issue of free speech. It goes to the heart of the question, “Who decides what is accurate information and what is misinformation?” The government employs medical doctors and scientists who express their opinions, but what about other medical doctors and scientists who disagree? Are we obliged to hear only the opinion of those healthcare professionals who are employed by the government? Is it possible their opinions are colored by the political agenda of their government employers?
On April 9, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure. . . you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election. . You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase skepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.”
The recently released documents show frequent further exchanges between Mr. Flaherty and Facebook, relentlessly pressing them to censor any information on their platform that did not conform to the White House position on vaccines. But the pressure didn’t stop there. President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reported asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” Undaunted, Biden replied, “They’re killing people.” Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.
Facebook was not the only platform strong-armed by Mr. Flaherty. Google was treated likewise in April, 2021, when he accused YouTube (owned by Google) of “funneling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH,” and required “more work to be done.” He demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavored content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to Covid-19 misinformation.”
This trove of emails recently released establishes a clear pattern. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government -approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorf, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line; in particular that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.
Ms. Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, summarizes the legal situation here: “The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly. Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.”
“The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americas were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.”
All Americans should be praying that the Biden Administration is held accountable for this unlawful censorship and violation of the First Amendment. It doesn’t matter what side of the political aisle you stand on; everyone deserves to know the uncensored truth.
