Facebook (Meta) reportedly had a secret reason for suppressing an election-altering scandal in 2020 after FBI priming: to appease then-candidate Joe Biden.
Facebook was ready and waiting to censor the New York Post’s exposé in 2020 after the FBI primed Big Tech companies to expect a major exposé on Biden’s son Hunter as “Russian disinformation.” But the House Judiciary Committee unveiled new information with the Post this week indicating that Facebook executives coordinated with the government and aimed to “curry favor” with a potential Biden-Harris administration by censoring speech in the lead up to the election.
Facebook’s then-vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg reportedly observed on the day the exposé appeared, addressing vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan, “Obviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”
The House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government uncovered communications from Facebook and Microsoft employees apparently showing that not only did Big Tech companies collude with the federal government on censorship activities, but they appear to have done so specifically to help Biden’s presidential campaign.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the Post published the first of its bombshell articles on the Hunter Biden laptop, which the Post said it had painstakingly verified, and which we now know the FBI had possessed also for nearly a year before the report was released. Yet, despite knowing the laptop was authentic, the FBI had prepared Big Tech to think differently. “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on Oct. 14.
The Post explained that internal Facebook communications show a similar attitude. One Facebook employee claimed that the Post story was the “[e]xact content expected for hack and leak.” Another Facebook employee even said in 2020, “Right on schedule.” Facebook and other Big Tech companies rushed to censor and/or discredit the bombshell report.
Significantly, back on July 15, 2020, a Facebook employee highlighted the company’s coordination with the federal government to censor online speech. “[W]hen we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the US Government] to plan for it,” the employee wrote, per the Post.
Ultimately, as an MRC survey showed, it was Big Tech and Big Media censorship of the scandal that swung the election in Biden’s favor. A 2020 MRC poll found that 9.4 percent of Biden’s voters would not have voted for him had they known the exposé’s contents.
Government officials continue to pressure social media to censor speech this election season. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) are among the lawmakers who have pushed social media to crush online speech before Election Day. Jen Easterly, the Biden-Harris administration’s director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), recently played up the threat of alleged “disinformation” online for a New York Times piece promoting censorship. And Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz defended censorship using a debunked legal standard during the CBS vice presidential debate.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook here and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “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.
