White House, Big Tech Colluded to Censor ‘Misinformation’: Lawsuit

The Biden administration worked in tandem with social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to censor statements they deemed “misinformation” about topics including the COVID-19 pandemic, two Republican state attorneys general said Thursday as they pushed for the release of emails between top executive branch officials and Big Tech titans.

In a petition filed Wednesday in Louisiana federal court, state Attorney General Jeff Landry and his Missouri counterpart Eric Schmitt charged that “dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies” engaged in a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,’” with the “intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.”

The Biden administration has not been shy about leaning on social media companies to police their content. On July 15, 2021, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted her colleagues were “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

“It’s important to take faster action against harmful posts … and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts,” Psaki added at the time.

The following day, Biden accused platforms like Facebook of “killing people” by allowing so-called “misinformation” to propagate unchecked.

Shortly after Biden’s comments, an email from an unidentified Facebook official to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy read in part: “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.”

Seven days later, on July 23, the same Facebook official proudly informed officials at the Department of Health and Human Services that the company was taking action against a group dubbed the “disinformation dozen” for their posts about COVID-19 vaccines.

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The relationship was so cozy that on July 20, 2021, White House COVID-19 Response Team Digital Director Clarke Humphrey received a response from Facebook in seconds when he asked about getting a fake Dr. Anthony Fauci Instagram account taken down.

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“We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done,” Schmitt said in a statement Thursday.

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