Internal Facebook communications reviewed by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed that the social media company submitted to White House pressure to remove content that suggested COVID-19 was a man-made virus.
The emails, which were obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, show dialogue between Facebook executives about the management of information President Joe Biden’s administration was trying to control.
“Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president of global affairs, said in a July 2021 email.
“We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy said. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
This discussion happened three months after Facebook decided to stop banning posts alleging a man-made or manufactured source of the COVID-19 virus. That decision came in light of “increasing debate about the virus’s origins,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
These and similar internal communications were obtained by the House Judiciary Committee as its members investigate an alleged effort from the Biden administration to censor Americans’ speech about Covid & other topics on social media. The emails were sent amid the White House’s nationwide push for Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in the spring and summer of 2021. Administration officials had begun to fault social media companies for not taking a hard enough stance against “misinformation,” with Biden saying in July that misinformers were “killing people.”
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After Biden’s comment, Facebook re-evaluated its policies about COVID-19 content at high levels in the company. In a memo, the Facebook vice president compared the Biden administration’s demands with Facebook’s then policies, revealing a disparity that the company did not seem willing to adjust at that time.
“There is likely a significant gap between what the White House would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing,” the Facebook vice president said.
While the Biden administration expressed a desire to restrict satirical content pertaining to Covid vaccines, some Facebook executives expressed concern about conforming to such demands.
“I can’t see Mark in a million years being comfortable with removing that—and I wouldn’t recommend it,” Clegg wrote in an email.
One draft memo to Facebook leadership in an April 2021 email questioned whether such censorship might “(push) them further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions.” The draft further noted that removing those kinds of posts could fuel “conspiracy theories'' about vaccine safety cover-ups.
Around that same time, Clegg was preparing to meet with the U.S. surgeon general about vaccine misinformation and was apparently anticipating some new pressure and tension from the White House.
“My sense is that our current course—in effect explaining ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the lines…is a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony,” Clegg said. “Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration—data flows etc—that doesn’t seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns.”
In August 2021, Facebook executives were exchanging emails about new COVID content policies, including increased punishments for users who violated these policies and had accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, owned by parent company, Meta Platforms. One recipient of those punishments was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now a Democrat presidential candidate, who posted vaccine-skeptical content and experienced consequences on both Instagram and Facebook.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said “these documents begin to reveal the pressure that Facebook and other social media companies were under to alter their content-moderation policies and remove protected speech to appease the federal government, particularly the Biden White House.”
The White House has said its efforts were in the interest of advancing certain public health goals, such as the adoption of vaccines. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that the Biden administration stands by efforts to minimize “misinformation” on social media platforms.
“We have consistently made it clear that we believe social-media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on the American people, while making independent decisions about the content of their platforms,” Jean-Pierre said.
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