Biden Officials ‘Relentless’ in Pressuring Social Media Companies to Censor COVID Content
01/10/23
By The Defender Staff
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/d...a-fbc33a92a86f
(Lots of hyperlinks embedded in the article that are not embedded here.)
"The authors of a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Sunday called out the “relentless, coercive pressure” the White House put on social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information that contradicted the government and mainstream media narrative.
The authors of a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Sunday called out the “relentless, coercive pressure” the White House put on social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information that contradicted the government and mainstream media narrative.
Jenin Younes and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty detailed key parts of an email exchange between Robert Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy and social media executives.
The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
Younes is litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance and represents the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. Kheriaty is a psychiatrist and author of three books, a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and one of the plaintiffs.
The emails are the latest in a slew of evidence — made public through lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and the “Twitter files” — that emerged in the last few months exposing “a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and other agencies.”
Quote:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr
@RobertKennedyJr
Here are the emails that show the White House colluded with Twitter to censor my tweets.
childrenshealthdefense.org
White House Colluded With Twitter to Censor RFK, Jr., Emails Reveal
A series of Jan. 6 tweets by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey detailed how Biden officials sought to censor tweets by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman 5:27 PM · Jan 9, 2023
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This included targeting tweets by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and others.
In their op-ed, Younes and Kheriaty cited the text of emails between Flaherty and a Facebook executive. Flaherty accuses Facebook of being “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy” and demands to know how the social media platform is working to change this on Facebook and WhatsApp.
Facebook responded with an extensive list of policy changes, including “removing vaccine misinformation,” “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation” and removing accounts “sensationalizing” what they acknowledged was “often true content.”
Unsatisfied with the results, Flaherty continued to pressure Facebook:
“Mr. Flaherty pressed the executive about why ‘the top post about vaccines today’ is Tucker Carlson ‘saying they don’t work’: ‘I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like,’ he said. The exec responded: ‘Running this down now.”
The documents reveal that Flaherty “also strong-armed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) 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.’”
Younes and Kheriaty also pointed out that President Biden, then-press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship.
They wrote:
“On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his ‘message to platforms like Facebook.’ He replied, ‘They’re killing people.’ Mr. 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.”
According to Younes and Kheriaty, the recently uncovered emails establish a clear pattern of the White House, represented by Flaherty, expressing anger at the companies’ failure to satisfactorily censor COVID-19 content. The companies changed their policies in response to his demands.
“As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific ‘consensus’ on critically important issues around Covid-19,” the authors of the op-ed wrote. “A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.”
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(The Wall Street Journal article referenced above) :
The White House Covid Censorship Machine
Newly released emails show how officials coerce social-media companies to toe the government line.
By Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty
Jan. 8, 2023
https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-h...le-11673203704
"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 (whose name we’ve redacted as a courtesy) 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.”
(The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but there is a podcast at the WSJ article link. )