White House Pressured Facebook to Censor Speech

By Staff, Agencies

Newly unearthed documents from Facebook have revealed that US President Joe Biden’s administration pressured the world’s largest social media platform to censor commentary by its users, potentially violating their constitutional right to free speech.

US House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Republican Jim Jordan obtained the documents amid his panel’s investigation of the administration’s “weaponization” of government. The documents prove that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their moderation policies because of “unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan said on Thursday.

Among the evidence cited by the lawmaker was an April 2021 email from a Facebook employee to top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine-discouraging content,” the sender said. The message noted, for example, that the White House had pushed for the censoring of a humorous meme that suggested the jabs might be unsafe.

Around the same time period, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, sent a message informing his colleagues that Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden on COVID-19 policies, was “outraged” that the platform didn’t take down the anti-vaccine meme. Clegg said he countered that removing the content “would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” but Slavitt disregarded that concern and argued that the meme would hinder the government’s vaccine-rollout effort.

Social media platforms themselves can legally choose how to restrict their content, but government intervention to influence those decisions could infringe on free-speech rights. After a report last October showed that the administration had set up a portal through which federal officials could make content-moderation requests to Big Tech, the American Civil Liberties Union said, “The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false – online or anywhere. Our government can’t use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights.”

Jordan warned earlier this week that his committee would vote to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress unless Facebook provided the documents it had subpoenaed on government interventions into content moderation. He added that the committee had seen enough evidence to believe that Facebook was holding back on turning over evidence that would show it faced the same sort of government pressure that was previously revealed by Twitter.