The White House Covid Censorship Machine

Newly released documents show that the White House played a major role in censoring social media. Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty in the Wall Street Journal have more.

Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s Director of Digital Media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House – not voluntarily. The emails emerged January 6th in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

On March 14th 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive (whose name we’ve redacted as a courtesy) with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy”, as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period… We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game…This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.” 

On March 21st, after failing to placate Mr. Flaherty, the Facebook executive sent an email detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation”. Facebook characterised this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking”. Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalised content”. 

In that exchange, Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what Facebook was doing to “limit the spread of viral content” on WhatsApp, a private message app, especially “given its reach in immigrant communities and communities of colour”. The company responded three weeks later with a lengthy list of promises.

On April 9th, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure… you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse”. He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election… You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase scepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.” 

On April 14th, Mr. Flaherty pressed the executive about why “the top post about vaccines today” is Tucker Carlson “saying they don’t work”: “I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like,” he said. The exec responded: “Running this down now.” 

On April 23rd, Mr. Flaherty sent the executive an internal memo that he claimed had been circulating in the White House. It asserts that “Facebook plays a major role in the spread of Covid vaccine misinformation” and accuses the company of, among other things, “failure to monitor events hosting anti-vaccine and Covid disinformation” and “directing attention to Covid-skeptics/anti-vaccine ‘trusted’ messengers”. 

On May 10th, the executive sent Mr. Flaherty a list of steps Facebook had taken “to increase vaccine acceptance.” Mr. Flaherty scoffed, “Hard to take any of this seriously when you’re actively promoting anti-vaccine pages in search,” and linked to an NBC reporter’s tweet. The executive wrote back: “Thanks Rob – both of the accounts featured in this tweet have been removed from Instagram entirely for breaking our policies.” 

President Biden, Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16th 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” He replied, “They’re killing people.” Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign. Mr. Flaherty also strong-armed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) of “funnelling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH”, and required “more work to be done”. Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavored content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to COVID-19 misinformation”.

Younes and Kheriaty explain that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment “bars Government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship”, while “the state-action doctrine bars Government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly”. The latest revelations show that the Government defence that the cooperation was voluntary is false.