In emails to White House, Facebook admits suppressing ‘often-true content’ on COVID-19 vaccines

Facebook told an official at the Biden White House in March 2021 that the Big Tech company took action against the “virality” of “often-true content” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines, in addition to suppressed misinformation about the shots.

The email are included in documents released this week by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey that he acquired through a court case.

The case, Missouri v. Biden, alleging that some of President Joe Biden’s top officials “colluded with Big Tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment.”

In the March 21, 2021, email a Facebook staff member discussed “levers for tackling vaccine hesitancy content” with Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, and Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy, according to The Daily Signal.

"You also asked us about our levers for reducing virality of vaccine hesitancy content," wrote the Facebook staffer, whose identity was redacted.

"As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable information. This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level because it is important for people to be able to discuss both their personal experiences and concerns about the vaccine, but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking."

“We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content,” the Facebook staffer also said. "More on this front as we proceed to implement."

In an April 22, 2021, email, Flaherty told Google staff that the White House remains "concerned that Youtube [sic] is 'funneling' people into hesitance and intensifying people’s hesitancy. We certainly recognize that removing content that is unfavorable to the cause of increasing vaccine adoption is not a realistic – or even good – solution."

Flaherty also said combating vaccine hesitancy "is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH," meaning the White House.