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The authors of a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Sunday called out the “relentless, coercive pressure” the White House put on social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information that contradicted the government and mainstream media narrative.
Jenin Younes and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty detailed key parts of an email exchange between Robert Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy and social media executives.
The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
Younes is litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance and represents the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. Kheriaty is a psychiatrist and author of three books, a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and one of the plaintiffs.
The emails are the latest in a slew of evidence — made public through lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and the “Twitter files” — that emerged in the last few months exposing “a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and other agencies.”
This included targeting tweets by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and others.
Here are the emails that show the White House colluded with Twitter to censor my tweets.https://t.co/6xD9MvfwLe
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) January 9, 2023
In their op-ed, Younes and Kheriaty cited the text of emails between Flaherty and a Facebook executive. Flaherty accuses Facebook of being “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy” and demands to know how the social media platform is working to change this on Facebook and WhatsApp.
Facebook responded with an extensive list of policy changes, including “removing vaccine misinformation,” “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation” and removing accounts “sensationalizing” what they acknowledged was “often true content.”
Unsatisfied with the results, Flaherty continued to pressure Facebook:
“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.”
The documents reveal that Flaherty “also strong-armed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) of ‘funneling’ 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.’”
Younes and Kheriaty also pointed out that President Biden, then-press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship.
They wrote:
“On July 16, 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.”
According to Younes and Kheriaty, the recently uncovered emails establish a clear pattern of the White House, represented by Flaherty, expressing anger at the companies’ failure to satisfactorily censor COVID-19 content. The companies changed their policies in response to his demands.
“As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific ‘consensus’ on critically important issues around Covid-19,” the authors of the op-ed wrote. “A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.”
