Facebook Bowed to White House Pressure, Removed Covid Posts

Internal Meta emails say pressure from Washington was behind a decision to take down posts attributing pandemic to man-made virus

By Ryan Tracy of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Facebook removed content related to Covid-19 in response to pressure from the Biden administration, including posts claiming the virus was man-made, according to internal company communications viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The emails show Facebook executives discussing how they managed users’ posts about the origins of a pandemic that the administration was seeking to control. “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” asked Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, in a July 2021 email to colleagues. 

“We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it.”"

"The emails viewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, date to the spring and summer of 2021, when the White House was mounting a nationwide push for Americans to get vaccinated for Covid-19. Part of that push included a public and private campaign to get Facebook to more aggressively police vaccine-related content.

Administration officials had come to believe that many Americans were hesitant to get vaccines because of false information they saw on Facebook. “They’re killing people,” President Biden said that July. 

The tongue-lashing caused Facebook to re-evaluate its policies about Covid-19 content—discussions that involved high-level company officials including Clegg and then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, the emails viewed by the Journal show. 

Following the president’s “killing people” comment, the Facebook vice president circulated a memo assessing the difference between Facebook’s content policies and the Biden administration’s demands—some of which the company appeared ready to push back on. 

“There is likely a significant gap between what the WH would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing,” the Facebook vice president said.   

As one example, the executive listed the White House’s desire that the company take action against humorous or satirical content that suggested the vaccines aren’t safe. 

“The WH has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed if it is premised on the vaccine having side effects, so we expect it would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed,” the vice president wrote."

"In some of the emails, Facebook executives expressed concern that removing posts in which Americans expressed hesitation about getting vaccinated could actually make them less likely to get a shot.

“There may be risk of pushing them further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions,” said one draft memo to Facebook leadership, included in an April 2021 email. Removing such posts could also fuel conspiracy theories about a coverup related to the safety of vaccines, the draft memo said. 

At the same time, Facebook officials appeared to feel pressure to address the White House’s concerns. As Clegg prepared to meet the U.S. surgeon general about vaccine misinformation in late July 2021, he emailed colleagues: “My sense is that our current course—in effect explaining ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the lines…is a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony.” 

“Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration—data flows etc—that doesn’t seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns,” he said.  

Facebook at the time was hoping to facilitate an agreement between U.S. and European officials allowing user data to flow across the Atlantic in compliance with privacy laws.  

By August 2021, Facebook executives were emailing each other about new planned changes to their Covid content policies. One change increased the punishments faced by users who ran afoul of content policies and had accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, another social-media platform owned by Meta, the emails show. 

For example, the company had previously removed the Instagram account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic now turned presidential candidate. But his Facebook account hadn’t faced the same punishment because it hadn’t posted the same content, the emails show.  

Under the new policy, Kennedy’s Facebook account wouldn’t be recommended to other users, a Facebook executive explained in an August email describing how the company was following up on the Biden administration’s requests."