![]() ![]() In an email chain with the subject line “You are hiding the ball,” Rob Flaherty, the director of digital strategy, said Meta should do more to “mitigate” anti-vaccine content on Facebook. Two White House staffers expressed their dissatisfaction with Meta’s compliance on March 15, 2021. The Supreme Court has been sharply divided over when and how government officials can intrude on the First Amendment during public health emergencies, with divided rulings on state-imposed limits on church attendance.Įmails from the White House presented in the federal court case show that White House officials flagged suspected Covid-19 misinformation frequently. Those considerations will have to be weighed, though, against the emergency circumstances surrounding the White House’s pandemic response, which may give White House officials some ammunition in court, legal scholars said. But with the recently released emails, legal scholars said the tech platforms and their users could have serious complaints about government pressure on tech companies. Ex-Twitter executives for instance, vocally argued in congressional testimony that their decision in 2020 to throttle a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had nothing to do with pressure from Democrats or law enforcement. One difference is that, in Jordan’s investigation and in the federal lawsuit, it’s not clear that powerful companies in Silicon Valley are the organizations pushing to take down certain posts. Courts have repeatedly rejected their arguments of bias, and a large volume of evidence points in the opposite direction, to tech platforms such as Facebook’s going easy on conservatives.īut now, they have finally hit on a censorship claim that may resonate beyond their base. “We shouldn’t have done it,” the employee added.įor years, Republicans have claimed that they’ve been unfairly censored on social media. The employee’s name was redacted in the email Jordan posted. “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” an employee wrote in a July 2021 email to colleagues, explaining why Meta had removed some posts saying SARS-CoV-2 was “man-made,” a theory that is still hotly debated and for which there is no conclusive evidence. Some Meta employees said in the internal communications that the White House’s arguments were having an effect on Meta’s actions, in part because of the possibility of soured relations with the administration. The Biden administration has said that its actions came at a unique time: the public health emergency around Covid-19 deaths, and specifically the pro-vaccination push of 2021. Republicans, including Jordan, argue that the White House requests violate the First Amendment rights of the tech platforms and their users, an allegation the White House denies. The emerging fight over the emails could reshape the relationship between tech giants and the federal government. The employees write about alleged efforts by the administration to sway how Facebook and Instagram handled posts, including content from false medical information about Covid-19 to memes about the vaccines. They aren’t a complete picture, including only the perspectives of Meta employees. They pertain mostly to the White House’s response to Covid-19, but some relate to the FBI’s responses to election misinformation and the Hunter Biden laptop investigation. The emails published by Jordan describe meetings, phone calls and other communications between Meta employees and Biden administration officials, some of them with people who worked in the White House. Jordan has requested documents from other tech companies about their communications with the Biden administration he has yet to post any. A district judge previously granted an injunction seeking to bar White House messages to tech companies, but the appeals court put that on pause while it considers the measure.Īnd in the congressional investigation, Jordan has been selectively posting on X even more internal emails from Meta, calling them “The Facebook Files.” He has published four installments so far, the most recent one last week. ![]() Kennedy Jr., now a presidential candidate, writing, “wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” A federal appeals court ruling on whether the White House should be limited in its communication with tech companies is expected in the coming weeks. ![]() In one email, a White House staffer wrote to Twitter flagging a tweet from vaccine critic Robert F. The lawsuit is partly based on internal emails from Meta and Twitter, now called X, and it includes communications to and from White House officials. ![]()
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