THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE
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— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
Representative Jim Jordan published internal Facebook discussions exposing how the company bent to pressure from the White House and censored Americans. In the documents, the Joe Biden administration is shown pressuring Facebook to censor a popular television news host and remove a meme.
In a thread published on Twitter, Jordan released a series of documents concerning pressure Facebook was receiving from the White House and the company’s subsequent increased censorship of content. The images published on Twitter are incomplete portions of the documents, and Jordan’s tweets provide additional context, such as dates and the sender of the email. He says he obtained the internal communications through a Judiciary Committee subpoena.
In April 2021, the White House demanded Facebook remove a meme that said, “10 years from now you will be watching tv hear…” Did you or a loved one take the Covid Vaccine? You may be entitled to…”” The meme is the featured image for this post.
What did the Biden White House want removed?
A meme.
That’s right, even memes weren’t spared from the Biden White House’s censorship efforts. pic.twitter.com/6BhDxTHsUi
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, wrote in an email that Andy Slavitt, then White House Senior Advisor for the Covid response, was “outraged – not too strong of a word to describe his reaction – that [Facebook] did not remove” the meme. He additionally said Slavitt expressed there was a consensus at a conference that he attended that Facebook was a “disinformation factory.”
In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post. pic.twitter.com/5muflAQjcx
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
Clugg reported he argued, “that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US.” Slavitt, currently a member of a President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on public health, countered, insisting that the meme “inhibits confidence in the covid vaccine amongst those the Biden administration is trying to reach.”
Other Facebook executives expressed concern about resisting the White House’s demands. Facebook’s VP of public policy, Brian Rice, expressed Slavitt’s “challenge felt very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days.”
He added, “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House] and our internal methods too.”
It appears as one example of Facebook attempting to improve its standing with the White House was by throttling a video published by then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In talking points drafted for Clegg, he is instructed to tell Slavitt that Facebook elected to give Carlson’s video a “50% demotion for seven days” despite the company reviewing the video and determining it “does not violate those policies.”
A document from August 2021 reveals that Facebook felt the pressure from the White House was mounting, and the company was seeking other methods to increase censorship to appease the Biden administration. Facebook asked teams to find “additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against Covid and vaccine misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”
As Facebook sought the administration’s direction regarding content censorship, it appears both sides wanted to downplay the relationship and sought to develop “discrete” ways to suppress certain viewpoints on the platform.
One option that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, considered was to ban users across their platforms. The example listed in the document was, “RFK Jr. is banned on Instagram, so his FB-Page will be nonrecommendable.”
But it wasn’t just the White House.
Facebook also changed its policies in direct response to pressure from Biden’s Surgeon General, censoring members of the “disinformation dozen.” pic.twitter.com/FvGuoqUlns
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023
Jordan introduced his Twitter thread as the “FACEBOOK FILES” and indicated that he had more documents to publish showing further collusion between the White House and Facebook. The Facebook Files is a spin on the Twitter Files, a series of disclosures, published by Matt Taibbi and other journalists who had access to Twitter’s internal communications, showing the company’s compliance with the US government’s demands concerning content suppression.
