Journalist Alex Berenson said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's admission that his company, Facebook, had been under pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor Americans, particularly around COVID-19-related content, will have implications for the legal battle with President Biden.
Berenson has long claimed that members of the White House and Pfizer executives conspired to silence his skepticism about the coronavirus vaccine, and is suing Biden, White House officials and Pfizer executives for violating his First Amendment rights by asking them to remove him from Twitter after he expressed concerns about the vaccination.
Zuckerberg made the startling admission in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) more than a year after he turned over thousands of documents to the committee as part of an investigation into content moderation on online platforms.
“If you look at what the Jim Jordan Committee has done, you see the pressure. It wasn't just one phone call or one email. The Biden administration has been exerting significant pressure on Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent Amazon and YouTube over many months,” Berenson told Fox News Digital.
Mehta CEO admits Biden-Harris administration pressured company to censor Americans
Journalist Alex Berenson said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's admission that his company, Facebook, had been pressured by the Biden-Harris administration to censor Americans would be a boon in the ongoing legal battle.
Berenson said he was “pleased” that Zuckerberg acknowledged that.
“This is important to my case, there's no question about it. We're going to cite that letter when we amend Berenson v. Biden, and we're going to do that,” he said.
Berenson, the former New York Times reporter, said the amended lawsuit will be filed “soon” and will include information that will shock Americans. Berenson said he has new information about why he was booted from Twitter at the height of the vaccine controversy in 2021, before Elon Musk bought the company and changed its name to X.
Twitter reinstated Berenson's account in July 2022 after he took legal action. The company settled the matter, acknowledging that Berenson's “Tweets should not have led to the suspension of his account.”
“I've been banned and my account has been wiped. This is serious censorship to me,” Berenson said.
“We now have new information about how that happened and what senior executives at Twitter thought about it,” he continued. “Anyone who is fair-minded will be shocked and disturbed.”
META CEO Zuckerberg admits involvement in Biden-Harris censorship plan. The US should have warned
President Biden and journalist Alex Berenson.
Berenson's lawsuit names as defendants Biden, White House advisers Andrew Slavitt and Robert Flaherty, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, Pfizer director and former FDA commissioner in the Trump administration Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
Berenson said it would become clear that government officials and senior Pfizer executives had worked together to censor his skepticism.
“I don't think there's anybody who can look at it and not recognize that,” he said.
Berenson believes Musk's strong belief in freedom of speech has made X the most important “place to get news” in the US and influenced Zuckerberg to uncover the truth.
“Should American voters trust Facebook? I think they can trust it more today than they did yesterday,” Berenson said.
“I think Elon has pushed Zuckerberg to define himself more on this issue, which is probably just as important as what Elon has done with X itself because Facebook is the bigger platform,” he added. “For Zuckerberg to say, 'We value free speech and we don't like this kind of pressure,' I think that's a really important step and I think Musk deserves some credit for that.”
Alex Berenson says Pfizer may reveal inside information about COVID vaccine in lawsuit against Biden
In Monday's letter, Zuckerberg also wrote about suppressing reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop. He wrote that the FBI had warned his company about a “possible Russian disinformation operation” about the Biden family and Burisma in the run up to the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg said that after an infamous New York Post article published days before the 2020 election reporting corruption allegations involving Biden's family, he had a fact-checker review the story and temporarily downgraded it while he waited for a response.
“It has since become clear that this report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should never have downgraded this story,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Berenson's lawsuit.
Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment.
Berenson also believes there is a clear “double standard” because if he were Biden, the mainstream media would “throw a curveball at Trump and say he doesn't care about the Constitution and the First Amendment.”
“They're allowed to do it because it's the Biden administration,” Berenson said.
“The Biden administration is exempt from censorship,” he continued. “Part of the reason is that the media has encouraged vaccine censorship, and partly because the media wanted Biden to win in 2020, so they ran this completely ridiculous story that this laptop was somehow hidden in a repair shop in Delaware by Russian operatives. It just doesn't make sense.”
A White House spokesperson previously told Fox News: “In the face of a deadly pandemic, this Administration has 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 consider the impact of their actions on the American people and make their own choices about the information they provide.”
Click here to get the FOX News app
Fox News Digital's Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
