During the pandemic, the Biden administration pressured social media companies to remove misinformation related to vaccines

By Gitanjali Poonia

President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, amid the rise in distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine. His administration blamed Facebook and other social media companies for “amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation,” as former press secretary Jen Psaki said during a press briefing on May 5, 2021.

This led the Biden administration to launch a pressure campaign against private companies like Meta, Twitter — now known as X — and Google, the owner of YouTube, to convince them to suppress certain information.

In one instance, Rob Flaherty, the former White House director of digital strategy, wrote to Facebook asking the company to send a detailed report related to allegations stemming from a Washington Post article from March 2021, which alleged Facebook was allowing misinformation to spread.

“I am not trying to play ‘gotcha’ with you. We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy period,” wrote Flaherty, adding, “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on.”

“This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us,” Flaherty wrote, as noted in the initial case document submitted to the Supreme Court.

Facebook in its response said, “We obviously have work to do to gain your trust. ... We are also working to get you useful information that’s on the level.” In the following days, the White House asked Meta to create censorship policies to discourage anti-vaccine content from going viral.

Supreme Court case zeroes in on how government and Big Tech should communicate

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case, Murthy v. Missouri. It was filed by two Republican now-former attorneys general — Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana — and five social media users who claim their posts related to the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election were censored and downgraded.

https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/03/18/supreme-court-murthy-v-missouri-social-media-government/