To appease the Biden White House, Big Tech gave into the federal government’s relentless pressure campaign to censor Americans’ speech, including true information.
.@JudiciaryGOP and @Weaponization obtained internal Google & Facebook docs revealing which Big Tech companies buckled first under pressure from the Biden White House to censor Americans’ posts, including true statements, jokes, memes, and opinions.
And once YouTube (Google) relented to censoring more content, the Biden White House used that as leverage to further increase the pressure on Facebook to do the same.
Remember how the Biden White House was “outraged” that Facebook didn’t censor a meme?
In that same April 2021 “hour long call,” Biden White House Senior Advisor Andy Slavitt warned Nick Clegg, Facebook’s President for Global Affairs, that “YT has made significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy whilst [Facebook has] lagged behind.”
That’s right. The Biden Admin praised Google for censoring Americans while criticizing Facebook.
In an internal Facebook email obtained by @JudiciaryGOP & @Weaponization, Clegg described his call with the Biden White House regarding censorship.
The email reveals that Nick Clegg—former UK Deputy Prime Minister—tried to reason with the Biden White House that, under America’s First Amendment, “removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US.”
But the Biden White House was unmoved, and the response to Facebook was clear: you need to be like Google and YouTube and censor more.
In response to the White House’s demands, Clegg asked his colleagues at Facebook to check whether the content is available on YouTube because the White House’s “assumption is that [YouTube] would never accept something like this.”
But why did Facebook and Google/YouTube relent to the White House’s pressure?
Because the companies had other policy priorities that they feared the White House could use as leverage against them.
Facebook executives warned that they had “bigger fish to fry.”
Meanwhile, the Google/YouTube Gov’t Affairs team cautioned that they were “seek[ing] to work closely with [the Biden] administration on multiple policy fronts.”
And so the gatekeepers of the modern town square relented—they censored Americans’ true speech and even jokes—all to appease the censors in the Biden White House.
While the Biden @WhiteHouse is trying to obstruct our investigation and hide its role in censoring Americans, the investigation by the @JudiciaryGOP and @Weaponization continues to make progress.
Yesterday, we issued deposition subpoenas to two senior Biden White House officials, Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt, who were central to communicating the Biden White House’s censorship demands. nypost.com/2023/11/30/new…
Stay tuned...
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THE YOUTUBE FILES PART 1. BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURED YOUTUBE TO CENSOR AMERICANS.
Internal docs from Google (YouTube’s parent company) obtained by @JudiciaryGOP and @Weaponization show that the Biden White House wanted Americans censored.
Almost one year ago today, @mtaibbi published the first edition of the Twitter Files, followed by other journalists including @shellenberger, @bariweiss, @lhfang, & @AlexBerenson.
BOMBSHELL REPORT ON THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
HUNDREDS of secret reports show how @DHSgov’s @CISAgov, The GEC (@StateDept), @Stanford and others worked together to censor AMERICANS before the 2020 election, including true information, jokes, and opinions.
🧵 THREAD:
The federal government, disinformation “experts” at universities, Big Tech, and others worked together through the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor & censor Americans’ speech.
According to one EIP member, the EIP was created “at the request of CISA.”
The head of the EIP also said that EIP was created after “working on some monitoring ideas with CISA.”
THE FACEBOOK FILES PART 5. BIDEN WHITE HOUSE RELIED ON FOREIGN “DISINFO” ACTIVISTS TO PRESSURE FACEBOOK TO CENSOR AMERICANS.
Internal FB docs recently obtained by @JudiciaryGOP and @Weaponization show the Biden Admin and foreign activists wanted Americans censored.
🧵 Thread:
The UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed that @RobertKennedyJr & 11 others were responsible for 65% “of anti‑vaccine content circulating on social media.”
But CCDH’s absurd claim about the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” was itself disinformation.
First, that 65% stat? CCDH was off by quite a bit. Facebook knew the actual number was closer to 0.05%.
Second, despite attacking @RobertKennedyJr and the others as the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” a lot of their accounts were “completely benign” according to Facebook.
THE FACEBOOK FILES PART 4. FBI LIED ABOUT MEETING WITH BIG TECH REGARDING NY POST’S HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY
Internal FB docs reveal that an FBI Special Agent made false statements in testimony about the FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story
🧵 Thread:
FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan is the main conduit between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and Big Tech.
Agent Chan was in the meeting between the FBI and Facebook on Oct. 14, 2020—the day the @nypost published its story on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Laura Dehmlow is the current Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force.
On Oct. 14, when Facebook asked if the laptop was real, she responded “no comment” even though the FBI had the laptop and knew it was real.
Newly subpoenaed internal notes of meetings between Facebook executives and Biden Admin officials reveal more about the lengths the Biden White House wanted to go to control true speech on Facebook.
In summer of 2021, the White House was mounting a nationwide push for Americans to get vaccinated for Covid-19.
Part of that push included a public and SECRET campaign to get Facebook to more aggressively police vaccine-related content, including TRUE information.
This wasn’t the Biden Admin's first pressure campaign.
In July 2021, FB’s head of Global Affairs asked why FB had been censoring the COVID lab leak theory. The answer was clear: “Because we were under pressure from the administration . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”