Missouri v. Biden and State Action: Just the Facts

 The White House and the Surgeon General's Office

"Considering their close cooperation and the ministerial ecosystem, we take the White House and the Surgeon General’s office together. Officials from  both  offices  began  communicating  with  social  media  companies—including Facebook, Twitter (now known as “X”), YouTube, and Google— in early 2021. From the outset, that came with requests to take down flagged content. In one email, a White House official told a platform to take a post down “ASAP,” and instructed it to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same [] genre” so that they could be removed, too. In another, an official told a  platform to “remove [an] account immediately”—he could not “stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately.” Often, those requests for removal were met.

....

 For  example,  in  an  effort  to  get  ahead  of  a negative news story, Facebook preemptively reached out to the White House officials to tell them  that the story “doesn’t accurately represent the problem or the solutions we have put in place.” The  officials  were  often  unsatisfied.  They  continued  to  press  the platforms on the topic of misinformation throughout 2021, especially when they seemingly veered from the officials’ preferred course. When Facebook did not take a prominent pundit’s “popular post[]” down, a White House official asked “what good is” the reporting system, and signed off with “last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.” [LOL]

To  ensure  that  problematic  content  was  being  taken  down,  the officials—via  meetings  and   emails—pressed  the  platforms  to  change  their moderation policies. For example, one official emailed Facebook a document recommending changes to the platform’s internal policies, including to its deplatforming   and   downgrading   systems,  with the note that “this is  circulating around the building and informing thinking.” In another instance, the Surgeon General  asked the platforms to take part in an “all-of-society” approach to  COVID by implementing stronger misinformation “monitoring” programs, redesigning their algorithms to  “avoid amplifying misinformation,”       targeting “repeat       offenders,”  “[a]mplify[ing] communications from trusted . . . experts,” and    “[e]valuat[ing]    the effectiveness of internal policies.” The  platforms  apparently  yielded.  They  not  only  continued  to  take down content the officials flagged, and provided requested data to the White House, but they also changed  their moderation policies expressly in accordance with the officials’ wishes.

Still, White House officials felt the platforms were not doing enough. One told a platform that it “remain[ed] concerned” that the platform was encouraging vaccine  hesitancy, which was a “concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the [White House].” So, the official asked for the platform’s “road map to improvement” and said it  would be “good to have from you all . . . a deeper dive on [misinformation] reduction.”...The Surgeon General contemporaneously issued a public advisory “calling out social media platforms” and saying they “have a role to play to improve []  health outcomes.” The next day, President Biden said that the platforms were “killing people” by  not acting on misinformation. Then, a few days later, a White House official said they were  “reviewing” the legal liability  of  platforms—noting  “the  president  speak[s]  very   aggressively about” that—because “they should be held accountable.”The  platforms  responded  with  total  compliance.  Their  answer  was four-fold. First, they capitulated to the officials’ allegations. The day after the President spoke, Facebook asked what it could do to “get back to a good place” with the White House."

The FBI

Next,  we  consider  the  conduct  of  the  FBI  officials.  The  agency’s officials regularly met with the platforms at least since the 2020 election. In these meetings, the  FBI shared “strategic information with [] social-media companies” to alert them to misinformation trends in the lead-up to federal elections....Apparently, the FBI’s flagging operations across-the-board led to posts being taken down 50% of the time.

Not as egregious as the White House, but how would you react if the FBI regularly met with you to express concerns about your posts on social media? The entire operation to marginalize, remove, suspend, and deplatform speech (often true speech) that contradicts the Government's official narrative reminds one of Big Brother's [or the Big Guy's] Ministry of Truth and the Thought Police in Orwell's 1984.

Were you shocked at the level of governmental interference with private expression on social media platforms? I was. I had no idea the level of Thought Policing was so extensive.