Tipsheet

Did You Catch This Detail About the White House Staffer Who Pressured Facebook Into Censoring Posts?

Earlier this week Meta [Facebook] CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan that his teams complied with a number of requests from the Biden administration to censor information on the global big tech platform. 

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," Zuckerberg said. 

"I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction - and we're ready to push back if something like this happens again," he continued. 

The White House issued no such apology and again justified the censorship of information they claim is "harmful."

Alarmingly, many of the White House staffers who worked to violate the First Amendment rights of Americans by pressuring private tech companies are now working on the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. In fact Rob Flaherty, who had a major role in pushing for censorship on behalf of President Biden, is now Harris's deputy campaign manager.  

Harris's vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, is also a proponent of government censorship.