The Facebook Files Expose Biden Administration’s Pressure on Covid Vaccine Critics
Leaked Facebook documents reveal the Biden Administration’s aggressive push to censor Covid vaccine skeptics, with executives reportedly yielding to pressure from White House officials and removing posts critical of the vaccine. Alex Berenson has the latest.
By July 2021, the Biden Administration pressure to censor Covid vaccine skeptics had grown so harsh Facebook executives believed the administration wanted the company to removeany “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.
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 White House.”
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.
All the hallmarks of socialist fascism. ‘The effectiveness of censorship in Mussolini’s regime could be measured in various ways. If the press officer or minister ordered a news blackout on a topic or pulled a story from the press, then that topic or story did not go out to the public. It was kept secret: preventive censorship had worked….. It was far more difficult to measure and control things which might be going on in the day to day interactions of ordinary people, in the routines of the stand-up comics, in the apartments, fields, sacristies, railway carriages, bars and brothels of Italy. Throughout the ventennio there was the lingering doubt, on the part of those in power, that the intended messages were getting lost, or worse, that they were being modified or resisted. A symptom of this frustration is the chivvying tone of Polverelli, Ciano, Alfieri and Pavolini when dealing with the pressmen. Another is Giovanni Gentile’s concern over the possibility of teachers at the periphery undermining central efforts at education reform. Yet another is the vast archive of anonymous denunciations received by senior members of the regime and prefects from all corners of the kingdom, indicating that not all was well… Read more »
Yes indeed.
It’s a good job our renowned Education System has taught kids how to think for themselves for the last thirty plus years, otherwise we’d be in a right mess and they’d just believe the propaganda that the BBC/Guardian come out with on a regular (but entirely predictable) basis.
The mRNA jabs may have failed at what the cover story was but they certainly were effective at something. And if this is just a taste of what’s happening to a few people with a camera trained on them then what’s happening to countless others?
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Sooner have kim jong un! At least you know where you stand with him, biden and his offspring are just slimy weasely liars!
All the hallmarks of socialist fascism. ‘The effectiveness of censorship in Mussolini’s regime could be measured in various ways. If the press officer or minister ordered a news blackout on a topic or pulled a story from the press, then that topic or story did not go out to the public. It was kept secret: preventive censorship had worked….. It was far more difficult to measure and control things which might be going on in the day to day interactions of ordinary people, in the routines of the stand-up comics, in the apartments, fields, sacristies, railway carriages, bars and brothels of Italy. Throughout the ventennio there was the lingering doubt, on the part of those in power, that the intended messages were getting lost, or worse, that they were being modified or resisted. A symptom of this frustration is the chivvying tone of Polverelli, Ciano, Alfieri and Pavolini when dealing with the pressmen. Another is Giovanni Gentile’s concern over the possibility of teachers at the periphery undermining central efforts at education reform. Yet another is the vast archive of anonymous denunciations received by senior members of the regime and prefects from all corners of the kingdom, indicating that not all was well… Read more »
Yes indeed.
It’s a good job our renowned Education System has taught kids how to think for themselves for the last thirty plus years, otherwise we’d be in a right mess and they’d just believe the propaganda that the BBC/Guardian come out with on a regular (but entirely predictable) basis.
Phew eh!
The mRNA jabs may have failed at what the cover story was but they certainly were effective at something. And if this is just a taste of what’s happening to a few people with a camera trained on them then what’s happening to countless others?
https://twitter.com/OV_Matter/status/1685134298700197888
Always knew Clegg was a Wet W**K!