The White House and Big Tech worked together to censor 'misinformation'

Two Republican state attorneys general said Thursday that the Biden administration worked with social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to censor what they called 'misinformation' about things like the COVID-19 pandemic. They said this as they pushed for the release of emails between top government officials and Big Tech titans.

In a petition filed Wednesday in federal court in Louisiana, state Attorney General Jeff Landry and his Missouri counterpart Eric Schmitt said that "dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies" were involved in a "massive, sprawling federal "censorship enterprise" with the "intent and effect" of pressuring social media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials don't like.

The Biden administration hasn't been afraid to put pressure on social media companies to keep their content under control. On July 15, 2021, Jen Psaki, who was the press secretary at the White House at the time, admitted that her coworkers were "reporting problematic Facebook posts that spread false information."

"It's important to act faster against harmful posts," Psaki said at the time. "Facebook needs to move faster to remove harmful posts that break the law."

The next day, Biden said that platforms like Facebook were "killing people" by letting "misinformation" spread without being stopped.

Shortly after Biden's comments, an unnamed Facebook employee sent an email to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that said, in part, "I know our teams met today to get a better idea of what the White House expects from us in the future about misinformation."

On July 23, seven days later, the same Facebook employee proudly told officials at the Department of Health and Human Services that the company was taking action against a group called the "disinformation dozen" for their posts about COVID-19 vaccines.

"We removed 17 more Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the disinfo dozen (for a total of 39 Profiles, Pages, Groups, and IG accounts deleted so far)," the email said. "This means that every member of the disinfo dozen has had at least one of these removed."

So close was the relationship that on July 20, 2021, when White House COVID-19 Response Team Digital Director Clarke Humphrey asked Facebook to take down a fake Dr. Anthony Fauci Instagram account, he got a response in seconds.

"Hello, is there any way to get this taken down?" Humphrey wrote, and a link to the account was included. "It's not one of our things."

"Yes, on it!" was the answer.

In another email from April 2021, there is a meeting planned for "Twitter to brief White House staff on vaccine misinformation." Still another record from July 28 of that year shows a Facebook employee suggesting to a CDC employee that "in addition to our weekly meetings, doing a monthly misinformation/debunking meeting, with maybe claim topics communicated a few days in advance so that you can bring in the matching experts and chat for 30 minutes or so."

The CDC worker said, "Yes, we would love to do that."

"We have already received a number of documents that clearly show that the federal government has a cozy relationship with social media companies and that they work together to censor freedom of speech, but we're not done," Schmitt said in a statement on Thursday.

"The Department of Justice is hiding behind executive privilege and has refused to hand over communications between the highest-ranking Biden Administration officials and social media companies. Because of this, we asked the Court yesterday to force the Department of Justice to give us those records. We're just getting started – stay tuned."

The AGs say they have found at least 45 people in HHS and the Department of Homeland Security who talked to social media companies about "misinformation." They also say that officials at the Census Bureau, the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, the State Department, and the Treasury Department knew at least something about the "Censorship Enterprise."

In addition to the document dump, Meta has said that at least 32 government officials, including people from the FDA, the US Election Assistance Commission, and the White House, have talked to the company about content moderation. Landry and Schmitt said that the government didn't tell anyone about these contacts. The AGs said that YouTube shared communications with 11 government officials, some of which were not shared by the government in response to the lawsuit.

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