Biden Admin Pressuring Facebook To Censor Conservatives Is More Proof Of Tech's Role As Government Agent

A year ago, we argued the Biden administration had treated Big Tech as an agent of the government -- as a workaround to the First Amendment, a constitutional clause that prohibits the White House from suppressing speech.

Newly obtained documents affirm the administration's efforts. The records reveal the White House pressured Facebook executives to manipulate its algorithm to dictate which sources of news are most visible.

"The memos, reviewed by Just the News, chronicle a series of meetings between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and executives from Facebook, now known as Meta, in spring 2021 as the first questions about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccine began surging on social media," reads the report from Just the News.

Specifically, the administration asked Facebook to showcase stories from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and bury content it dubbed "polarizing," such as posts from The Daily Wire and Tomi Lahren.

Flaherty asked Facebook, “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?”

The White House targeted Lahren, who hosts a show for OutKick, after she publicly announced she would not receive the Covid-19 vaccine.

Lahren plans to address the documents on her show Tomi Lahren Is Fearless on Thursday, streaming across OutKick's social media platforms.

The Daily Wire is one of the most influential news sources on Facebook and filed a lawsuit challenging Biden's mandate that forced employees to receive the vaccine as a term to keep their jobs.

The Daily Wire and Lahren are not the first targets of what is an unconstitutional relationship power dymanic between the White House and Big Tech.

Last summer, internal communications showed the Biden administration also urged Twitter to silence critics of mRNA vaccines, particularly former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson.

“They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson,” one Twitter employee wrote to another to describe a recent meeting with Andy Slavitt, senior advisor to President Biden’s COVID response team. “Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz that had shown he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”

Twitter eventually removed Berenson, though he was reinstated following a lawsuit.

While damning, the White House never hid its efforts to intercept information during the pandemic In July of 2021, then-press secretary Jen Psaki admitted the White House had been identifying “problematic” posts for Facebook to censor because they contained what the Biden admin deemed “misinformation” about COVID-19.

A month later, Facebook announced it had removed over 20 million pieces of Covid “misinformation,” including posts that doubted that mRNA vaccines stopped the spread.

In other words, Facebook punished posts for publishing the truth.

Facebook is the most influential social media platform in the world. Its suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story changed the course of the 2020 presidential election, per surveys. Undoubtedly, its manipulation of the conversation during the pandemic also influenced how individuals responded to Covid.

So, while Elon Musk undid the Biden admin's monopoly on Big Tech, Twitter is still ill-equipped to compete with the mass reach of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

For those reasons, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds told Just the News that The Daily Wire and Lahren could “and probably should” sue the federal government and Facebook over what is an obvious case of government-influenced censorship.

Reynolds is on point. Government-influenced censorship is a First Amendment case.

The Biden administration turned to a third party to subvert the foundation of the Constitution. The White House used its power to turn a private platform, Facebook, into a “state actor,” whom citizens can sue for restricting First Amendment rights.

As we reported last August, "the U.S. government does not have the legal ability to censor the public on its own. So, here is an administration trying to seize unconstitutional power by strong-arming a communication platform beholden to a protection called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.