Told Facebook to suppress disfavored views during COVID

Bob Unruh
WND News Center

The Biden administration already has been in court over its demands that people simply accept the experimental COVID injections.

And lost.

Now it’s facing the possibility of another court fight over its COVID agenda.

The warning comes from Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, which sued the government in its fight against Biden’s orders that Americans accept those shots, which now have proven to threaten significant injury, including heart disease.

Shapiro said, “The Biden White House’s pressure on Facebook to target Daily Wire for traffic reduction is an obvious, disgusting, and predictable First Amendment violation. Government action is still government action even when the government is cudgeling private corporations to do the dirty work of censorship.”

He continued, “We sued the Biden administration to stop the OSHA vaccine mandate, and we’re not afraid of taking them to court again to preserve free speech rights. We’re looking into all available remedies as we speak.”

His comments came in a report in Just the News that Facebook turned over notes to Congress that are alarming constitutional lawyers.

In those notes, there are details about how the Biden White House met with Facebook officials during COVID and insisted the company “tweak its algorithm to showcase stories from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal over content posted by ‘polarizing’ conservative journalists and commentators in early 2021.”

The apparent goal of the meetings was to limit diverging opinions and allow Americans to see only promotions of the COVID shots.

Just the News said it reviewed the notes, from a series of meetings between Rob Flaherty, of Biden’s White House, and Facebook officials.

The memos recently arrived, under subpoena, at the House Judiciary Committee.

The report said they make it clear Biden was “sometimes pressuring the social media giant to moderate content in a way that would encourage more Americans to get inoculations.”

While Biden later required such shots for Americans, he was reversed in the courts and by Congress.

In one meeting, Flaherty asked if Facebook could adjust its programming to “promote The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over The Daily Wire and Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren,” the report said.

“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?” Facebook’s notes explain Flaherty charged.

Lahren told the public she was refusing the shots, and Daily Wire went to court to challenge Biden’s mandates.

Flaherty also asked, “What are the things driving hesitancy on your platform? What is it? How big is the problem? When you are intervening, how are you measuring success?”

Lahren told Just the News Biden’s attempts to suppress her comments were “disturbing.”

“Free speech is on its last leg under Joe Biden,” she said.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan previously has confirmed that social media was pressured by Biden to suppress some messaging, in a way that threatened free speech.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said, in the Just the News report, “This is why I have asked Congress to pass a law barring federal employees from engaging in censorship and targeting of citizens. Agencies have a right to speak in their own voices. Instead, the Biden administration sought to engage in what I have called ‘censorship through surrogate.’ This is part of that pattern.”

It’s unconstitutional for the government to directly censor speech. What Biden was doing in this situation was to pressure private companies to do the censorship for him, which when they act “under color of law” also violates the Constitution.