As Mark Zuckerberg reflected this week, the Harris-Biden administration launched a very aggressive campaign to censor COVID-related content on Facebook at the height of the pandemic, cracking down on light-hearted memes, satirical posts, and even plain old jokes.
On Monday, Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, that Biden Administration officials, including from the White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook parent company Meta in 2021 to “censor” pandemic-related content and The Washington Post's exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.
The removal requests included posts that Zuckerberg deemed “humorous and satirical.” He did not provide details, but Jordan's “Facebook Files” included several examples that have been publicly available on X since July 2023.
In April 2021, Facebook's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, told colleagues that Biden's COVID-19 advisor, Andy Slavitt, was “upset that Biden didn't remove a top vaccine-related post – that's not a strong enough word to describe his reaction.”
The post was a meme shared by Facebook user Timothy McComas, which played on a popular format in which Leonardo DiCaprio's character from the film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” points at a TV screen with a beer and a cigarette in hand.
The meme was captioned, “Ten years from now, you'll be watching TV and asking: 'Have you or a loved one had the Covid vaccine? You may be eligible…'”
“We countered that removing such content would be a serious infringement on the traditional boundaries of free expression in the United States,” Clegg said.
Slavitt denied the allegations, claiming that this post and others like it “clearly undermine confidence in the COVID vaccine among those the Biden Administration is seeking to benefit from.”
In another case, Facebook caved to White House pressure to censor a Tucker Carlson video related to the COVID-19 pandemic, agreeing to limit its reach by 50%. We determined that the video does not violate our policies.
During an April 5, 2021, conference call with Facebook employees, Courtney Lowe, who was then serving as President Biden's chief strategic communications adviser on COVID-19 policy, mocked the ability of Facebook users to distinguish truth from fiction on the site.
“If someone in rural Arkansas sees something on Facebook, it's true.” Rowe says“What we need is help dispelling the myths.”
By July 2021, President Biden was publicly slamming Facebook, declaring that the site was “killing people” by failing to crack down on “misinformation” about COVID-19.
The White House also called on Facebook to crack down on “vaccine hesitancy content,” including “humorous or satirical content that suggests vaccines are unsafe.” According to documents discovered by Jordan,.
Amid mounting pressure, Facebook's vice president for content policy circulated a memo in July 2021 detailing the gap between what the White House wanted to curb and what the company was willing to tolerate.
“The White House has previously suggested that humor based on the premise that vaccines have side effects should be removed, and we would expect they would like to remove humor related to vaccine hesitancy as well,” the vice president wrote in the document. Obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
“I can't imagine that Mark would be happy to remove it and I wouldn't recommend it,” Clegg replied.
Nonetheless, by August 2021, Facebook executives agreed to come up with ways to “be more aggressive against misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.”
“This stems from ongoing criticism of our work by the U.S. government,” one company document said.
In a letter to the committee on Monday, Zuckerberg said Meta has since instituted policies to ensure similar censorship “doesn't happen again.”
“As I told my team then, I feel strongly that our content standards should not be compromised in response to pressure from the Administration, and we are prepared to fight back if something like this happens again,” he wrote.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Jordan said the House Judiciary Committee had “called several Facebook officials to the stand” as it investigated the censorship campaign.
“They caved in to that,” Jordan said, “and I think he makes a very clear point that they regret doing so, and they've said that going forward, they're not going to cave in to government pressure from either side. They're not going to trust these 'independent' fact-checkers.”
Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, said Facebook should also be called out for how it handled the situation.
Turley noted that the social media giant had embraced strict “content moderation” across the board for years, but reversed course following pressure from Congress.
“Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Mehta want people to know that they were 'pressured' to censor and they truly regret their role in silencing dissent,” Turley said. Fox News column“It's false remorse born of forced exposure.”
The White House defended its actions this week, saying it “encouraged responsible behavior to protect public health and safety.”
“Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should make autonomous choices about the information they provide, while considering the impact of their actions on the American people,” the White House said.
