The Patriot Post® · White House Put Thumb on Facebook Scales

Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, recently released a second and third tranche of what has been dubbed the “Facebook Files,” documentation exposing the degree of the Biden administration’s corrupt censorship collusion with Facebook.

Conservative organizations like ours have experienced an aggressive silencing campaign by Facebook, suppressing our content reach — even to those who have specifically chosen to follow us.

This latest Facebook Files consists of email communications from the spring of 2021 between Facebook employees and members of the Biden administration, including Joe Biden’s former director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty.

Of note is the blatant requests by the Biden administration to increasingly suppress conservative news media, including specifically named media outlets like the New York Post (which, by the way, broke the Hunter Biden laptop story) and the Daily Wire.

For example, in one email from Flaherty, he asked why the New York Post hasn’t been suppressed more: “I’m curious — NY Post churning out articles every day… What is supposed to happen to that from Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?”

Justifying the request for increasing censorship, the Biden administration uses terms like “misinformation” and “bad information” repeatedly. For instance, in an email from June of 2021, Flagerty wrote: “We’re keen on what platforms are doing to reduce the spread of bad information, that platforms are not funneling people towards bad content. That’s our primary concern.”

Facebook, clearly feeling the pressure from the Biden administration to effectively take down people and content the administration didn’t like, explained its method for suppression without outright ousting individuals from the platform: “That’s why from product perspective, it’s so important to look at mechanisms — if we can’t remove it, at least we need to contain it.”

But beyond merely seeking to censor and suppress the reach of conservative media outlets and individuals, however, Biden’s censorship team also pressed Facebook into elevating and expanding the reach of Leftmedia outlets. Flaherty wrote on April 14, 2021: “If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?”

This latest revelation shows that the Biden administration wasn’t content just to censor information it didn’t want Facebook users to see, but it went beyond that, seeking to push Leftmedia outlets that serve the narratives or propaganda it wants. In short, Team Biden was seeking to control what information Americans were given.

As Jordan observed, “The Biden White House wanted to control what you saw on Facebook.” He further noted: “They questioned whether Facebook could change its algorithm so users saw more posts from the New York Times and less from [the Daily Wire] and [Tomi Lahren]. Why did they do that? Because they didn’t think you were smart enough to decide for yourself.”

The emails also reveal that the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on Facebook bore fruit. In an email from July 2021, a Facebook employee effectively gave a summary report to the White House on the process of its suppression campaign:

And we attacked virality aspect through feed demotion. We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts [on vaccines]. Similarly, posts questioning whether you should get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those. That’s not false information, but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach. What we normally do is just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduce a middle ground.

There is increasing evidence that the Biden administration has been engaged in blatantly violating Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech. Members of Biden’s team have been caught actively seeking to both censor unwanted news and viewpoints while also artificially promoting those narratives and viewpoints they want mainstreamed. This is the stuff of dictatorial regimes in banana republics.