Biden administration and foreign activists wanted Americans censored, Jim Jordan says, citing docs

The Biden administration and foreign activists wanted to censor Americans online, according to documents obtained by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is now running against President Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary, was a top target for censorship due to his vocal skepticism regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, Jordan said Tuesday. 

The U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate dubbed Kennedy and 11 others the "disinformation dozen" and claimed they were behind 65% of online anti-vaccine content. Jordan said the statistic "was itself disinformation," as the real number, per Facebook, was closer to 0.05% of online content.

The center published its report in March 2021, and the following month, Facebook employees were preparing to inform founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the White House was putting "pressure ... to remove entities that are seen to be contributing to a large amount of vaccine misinformation content," according to an internal company document posted by Jordan on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

"Facebook was stunned that the Biden White House seemed to actually believe the CCDH’s obviously false stat and was relying on these foreign activists’ 'data' to 'guide major governmental policy decisions,'" Jordan wrote on X, along with a picture of an email from Facebook supporting his claims indicating that the administration relied on the center's statistic.

The U.K.-based center admitted that it communicates with the federal government and Big Tech about moderating content, per Jordan. The agency has until Sept. 29 to respond to a House subpoena. 

Jordan started releasing documents earlier this summer as part of what he calls the "Facebook files" to show the intense pressure that the Biden administration put Facebook under to censor content.

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