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Jim Jordan: New ‘smoking gun’ docs prove Biden WH coerced eager-to-please Facebook into widespread censorship

July 28, 2023 | | Print Article

House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan on Thursday shared “smoking gun” documents that he alleged prove that Facebook has previously censored content at the behest of the Biden White House.

He shared the documents in a Twitter thread that he called “The Facebook Files” in honor of “The Twitter Files” that were released earlier this year.

“Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” he wrote in the thread.

“During the first half of 2021, social media companies like Facebook faced tremendous pressure from the Biden White House—both publicly and privately—to crack down on alleged ‘misinformation,'” he continued.

In April of 2021, for example, an FB employee sent an email to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg warning them that they were “facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove” content that dissented from the establishment’s COVID orthodoxy.

In another April 2021 email, Facebook president for global affairs Nick Clegg wrote that a senior adviser to President Joe Biden was “outraged” that the social media network didn’t remove a simple ol’ COVID meme.

In Clegg’s email, he further revealed that he’d pushed back on the senior adviser by noting that “removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the U.S.” But the adviser didn’t care.

Facebook responded by panicking.

“In another April 2021 email, Brian Rice, Facebook’s VP of public policy, raised the concern that [the adviser’s] challenge felt ‘very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days,'” Jordan explained.

According to the GOP congressman, however, this sentiment was trumped by Facebook’s desire “to repair its relationship with the White House to avoid adverse action.”

Continuing his thread, Jordan then drew attention to the time that the Biden White House “demanded to know why Facebook had not censored a video from” then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“To appease the Biden White House, talking points were drafted for Clegg. Facebook was ready to tell the White House that it had demoted a video posted by Tucker Carlson by 50% in response to the White House’s demands, even though the post didn’t violate any policies,” Jordan noted.

Meanwhile, President Biden publicly denounced Facebook, claiming that it was “killing people” by not censoring content the administration wanted censored.

In response, Facebook bent the knee and announced on Aug. 2nd of 2021 that it would be changing its policies because of the Biden White House.

According to Jordan, Facebook also censored content to appease Biden’s surgeon general.

Concluding his thread, the GOP congressman argued that these documents “prove that the Biden Admin abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance.”

He added that the documents were handed over to Congress only after he’d threatened to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress.

“Based on Facebook’s newfound commitment to fully cooperate with the Committee’s investigation, the Committee has decided to hold contempt in abeyance. For now. To be clear, contempt is still on the table and WILL be used if Facebook fails to cooperate in FULL,” he concluded.

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Vivek Saxena
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