Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) released the latest installment of the Facebook Files, exposing Big Tech censorship of COVID-19 information and how no amount of censorship ever appeared to be enough for President Joe Biden.
Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, released internal communications among Facebook executives showing what he described as “the CHILLING EFFECT government coercion has on free expression” when platforms are asked to censor free speech. The documents center around Facebook’s censorship of posts purporting that COVID-19 had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, a theory even Biden administration officials eventually declared credible. While Facebook did censor the theory, along with vaccine information, it was not enough to satisfy the Biden administration, which pressured the company in 2021 to ramp up its censorship of COVID-19 information even more.
When Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” in August 2021, trying to demand more censorship of COVID-19 vaccine information, Facebook “was livid,” Jordan posted on X (formerly Twitter). Following Biden’s remark, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked, “Can we include that the W[hite ]H[ouse] put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?”
Then-Vice President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg responded in a text Jordan shared, shockingly revealing the depth of government-Big Tech coordination to suppress free speech. “The behavior of the WH over the last 24 hours has been highly cynical and dishonest,” he wrote. “I am trying to speak to WH over the weekend - the team is in meeting with the surgeon general right now whose team has privately been telling us that we [are] doing a decent job. Infuriating.” It appeared that Biden’s comment was only the public culmination of a wealth of behind-the-scenes communications between the administration and Facebook.
Jordan also shared an email from earlier in 2021 from an unidentified Facebook employee to Zuckerberg about how the company censored the COVID-19 lab leak theory. This included labels claiming content was false, so-called fact checks and reduction of content distribution. “There were five claims that met the [censorship] standard, including the claim that Covid is ‘man-made, manufactured, bioengineered, a bioweapon, or created by an individual government or country,’ which includes claims that that the virus was modified through gain of function research and leaked from a lab,” the Facebook employee wrote via email.
This lab leak theory content was censored between May 2020 and February 2021 (per the email) with fact checks and reduced distribution, and the content continued to be targeted into May 2021. When this censorship standard was reversed and Zuckerberg became aware of it, he commented, “This seems like a good reminder that when we compromise our standards due to pressure from an administration in either direction, we’ll often regret it later.” When Clegg asked in July 2021 why Facebook had censored the lab leak theory, the answer was, per Jordan, “Because we were under pressure from the administration … We shouldn’t have done it.”
After Biden’s “killing people” accusation, Jordan explained that even Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg accused the Biden White House of “scapegoating” Facebook. Sandberg speculated that lower-than-hoped-for COVID-19 vaccination rates spurred the White House reaction in the thread that included, among other top execs, Joel Kaplan, VP of Global Public Policy. Zuckerberg agreed with Sandberg in a similar message in which he claimed that Facebook outperformed other Big Tech platforms in censoring speech related to COVID-19. “We have done so much to promote authoritative information and have been more effective than other platforms at combating misinformation,” Zuckerberg stated in text shared by Jordan. “This is scapegoating at its worst.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at (650) 308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
