(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Over the last year, the House Weaponization Subcommittee has revealed numerous instances of the Biden administration pressuring tech companies to censor politically inconvenient content, including truthful information.
On Wednesday, the Weaponization Subcommittee released an 880-page report that synthesizes all the research it’s done over the last year. The report shows that the Biden administration pressured Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to censor content. The report also shows that the White House’s pressure was effective.
🚨 #BREAKING: Weaponization Committee Exposes the Biden White House Censorship Regime in New 800 Page Report
This interim report details the months-long campaign by the Biden White House to censor Americans on Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube.
Read it here: https://t.co/wz0jHtyTrc pic.twitter.com/cbf58RMhFa
— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) May 1, 2024
“By the end of 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon changed their content moderation policies in ways that were directly responsive to criticism from the Biden Administration,” the report stated.
According to the report, the White House’s pressure on Facebook was mostly related to content about the COVID-19 vaccine.
For instance, one email obtained by the Weaponization Subcommittee showed an unnamed Facebook employee telling executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in April 2021 that “we are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content.”
In another April 2021 email, Facebook executive and former UK politician Nick Clegg told his team that Andy Slavitt, a senior advisor to President Joe Biden, was “outraged … that we did not remove this post, which was third most highly ranked post in the dataset we sent him.”
According to the report, Facebook responded to the Biden administration’s pressure with enhanced censorship efforts. In August 2021, an unmaned Facebook employee circulated an internal email about additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against Covid and vaccine misinformation.”
“This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the US administration,” that email said.
Remarking on these chain of events, the Weaponization Subcommittee’s report said the Biden administration “completed its mission: one of the world’s largest social media platforms again succumbed to pressure and violated its own principles to appease a powerful government office.”
The 880-page report outlined similar issues with Google’s YouTube, Amazon and Twitter.
With YouTube, the White House repeatedly expressed particular concern about the platform’s “failures” to not censor “borderline content”—content that does not violate YouTube’s content-moderation policies.
“Like Facebook, YouTube ultimately capitulated and changed its content-moderation policies after months of pressure from the White House,” the report said.
“In September 2021, after continued criticism for not censoring ‘borderline’ or non-violative content, YouTube shared a new ‘policy proposal’ to censor more content criticizing the safety and efficacy of vaccines with the White House and asked for ‘any feedback’ they could provide before the policy had been finalized.”
Similarly, Amazon changed its bookstore’s content moderation policy in response to White House pressure, the report found.
According to the Weaponization report, the White House emailed Amazon in March 2021 about the “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation at Amazon.”
“Immediately after the initial email outreach from the White House, Amazon internally accelerated its consideration of implementing a new policy that would disfavor anti-vaccine books,” the report said.
The Weaponization Subcommittee’s report didn’t focus as much on Twitter. Censorship on that platform has been revealed by previous subcommittee reports, a series of media articles known as the “Twitter Files,” and in the ongoing Missouri v. Biden litigation.
However, the report did mention again that the White House tried to cencor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who was Biden’s Democratic primary challenger.
“For example, on just the third day of the Biden Administration, the White House emailed Twitter (now X) personnel to demand that a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be ‘removed ASAP,’” the report said.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
