Censoring the truth

In a bombshell letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the company’s Facebook platform had censored the speech of Americans in response to “pressure” from the Biden-Harris administration. His letter confirms that the White House used social media companies to silence information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine hesitancy. Zuckerburg also admitted to wrongly demoting the New York Post’s reporting regarding the Hunter Biden laptop because the FBI had indicated that the story was Russian disinformation.

These admissions establish that the Biden-Harris administration made unreasonable demands to get Facebook to censor speech it didn’t like.

It’s a key First Amendment principle that the government may not silence individuals because it disagrees with them. But the First Amendment does not apply to the actions of private individuals or companies. Thus, the government can attempt to skirt the constitutional prohibition by using third parties to suppress speech on its behalf. As Justice Samuel Alito recently explained, determining when the government crosses the line by coercing social media companies into suppressing speech is one of the most important First Amendment issues of the day. The fact that such platforms have “hate speech” and “misinformation” policies that would flunk First Amendment scrutiny only makes them even more attractive targets for government coercion.

Zuckerburg’s letter admitted such coercion is occurring. In particular, he wrote that in 2021, senior Biden-Harris administration officials “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.” The White House, moreover, “expressed a lot of frustration” with Meta when it refused to bow to the administration’s censorship choices. Zuckerburg went on to concede that in response to “this pressure,” Facebook made changes to the way it moderated COVID-19 content.

The White House was unapologetic, issuing a statement defending its approach to COVID-19 content. The Biden-Harris administration admitted to encouraging what it viewed as “responsible actions to protect public health and safety.” There’s no question that the U.S. government can use its bully pulpit to convince private individuals and companies like Meta to pursue certain policies. But what it can’t do is secretly strong-arm private companies into silencing its political opponents. Indeed, in its last term, a unanimous Supreme Court made it clear in National Rifle Association v. Vullo that “a government official cannot directly or indirectly coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.”

Just how much pressure did the White House put on Meta? Quite a lot, it turns out. In his letter, Zuckerburg noted that his team often disagreed with the content moderation demands of the Biden-Harris administration. And despite this disagreement and despite saying that the government’s “pressure was wrong,” Zuckerberg’s Facebook did the White House’s bidding.

Zuckerberg also expressed regret over Facebook’s handling of the story concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop. According to Zuckerberg, the FBI had alerted social media companies to a “Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma.” When the New York Post broke the story, Facebook preemptively demoted it and sent it to fact-checkers. Zuckerberg confessed to the error, admitting that it was not Russian disinformation and that Facebook “shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

While one can fault Zuckerberg for demoting content before fact-checking it (a policy Facebook has since changed), the real blame for censorship once again lies at the feet of the U.S. government. Social media companies were fed false information by the FBI in an attempt to censor speech to help a particular presidential candidate. That’s startling.

The Zuckerberg letter also supports the state of Missouri’s claims in Murthy v. Missouri. In that case from the Supreme Court’s last term, Missouri alleged facts showing that Facebook caved to pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor speech. In May 2021, at a news conference, the White House press secretary demanded that Facebook and other social media platforms “stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19, vaccinations, and elections.” She issued a not-so-veiled threat suggesting that social media companies could face a “robust anti-trust program.”

In July 2021, the White House demanded that Facebook remove the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” from its platform because of their vaccine skepticism. The White House communications director later piled on saying that the Biden-Harris administration was considering amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—a statute that broadly shields social media companies from liability for the content they allow to be posted. Missouri alleged Facebook at first refused to remove the 12 people in question because the accounts did not violate its policies.

Faced with these threats, Meta caved. By August 2021, it reported that it had removed more than three dozen pages, groups, and Facebook or Instagram accounts linked to the “Disinformation Dozen” because those accounts had spread COVID-19 vaccine “misinformation.”

The Zuckerberg letter confirms the motivation. Meta censored Americans on its platforms at the behest of the Biden-Harris administration. But government censorship through social media companies is no less harmful to the First Amendment than the direct suppression of speech. The Biden-Harris administration should be held accountable for silencing its political opponents.