A series of internal Facebook emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee confirm that the Biden White House placed significant pressure on the company to crack down on “misinformation” related to the Covid pandemic in early 2021.

The emails, released publicly by committee chairman Jim Jordan on Thursday, suggest that in some cases Facebook and Instagram complied with the White House’s content-moderation requests in order to avoid public and private backlash.

One April 2021 email sent by a Facebook employee on behalf of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged that, “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House."

That same month Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global Affairs, informed his team that senior Biden adviser Andy Slavitt, was "outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove" a popular post. According to the Ohio Republican, the offensive content was a humorous meme that suggested vaccine recipients would be solicited to join class-action lawsuits in the future.

What did the Biden White House want removed?

A meme.

That's right, even memes weren't spared from the Biden White House's censorship efforts. pic.twitter.com/6BhDxTHsUi

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023

Recounting his conversation with Slavitt, Clegg said in the email that he pushed back on the demand, pointing out “that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US." However, Slavitt rejected the argument altogether, according to the high-ranking Facebook official: “he replied that the post directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way which demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden administration is try to reach.”

Replying to Clegg’s email, Facebook’s vice president of public policy Brian Rice said that he saw Slavitt’s demand as a “crossroads” and suggested to colleagues that it should inform their content-moderation practices going forwad.

“Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House], and our internal methods too,” Rice wrote in a reply to Clegg’s email.

By July 2021, President Biden was accusing platforms such as Facebook of “killing people” by refusing to censor “misinformation” related to the virus. “They’re killing people,” Biden said during a press conference at the time. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

The public and private pressure appears to have yielded results: weeks after Biden’s comments, on August 2, 2021, Facebook leadership asked employees to “brainstorm some additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against…misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration."

When the White House demanded that Facebook remove a Covid-related Tucker Carlson video, Facebook refused but offered the olive branch of suppressing the clip’s reach by 50 percent for seven days while the video was fact-checked, according to a “talking points” memo Clegg disseminated to his colleagues.

Clegg disseminated “talking points” drafted to relay to the White House after it did not ban a Tucker Carlson video – which did not violating any rules – that included the olive branch gesture that the clip received a “50% demotion for seven days” severely curtailing its reach.

In February, Jordan subpoenaed several large high-tech firms including Meta, Amazon, and Apple demanding documents pertaining "to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction or reduced circulation of content."

Jordan accused Facebook of obstructing his committee’s investigation, pointing out that not until the panel threatened to hold Zuckerberg in contempt “did Facebook produce ANY internal documents to the Committee, including these documents, which PROVE that government pressure was directly responsible for censorship on Facebook,” Jordan wrote on Twitter.

Meta has yet to respond to National Review’s request for comment.

Jordan has also invited “Twitter Files” investigative journalist Matt Taibbi to testify before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to explain how federal actors had collaborated with social-media companies to stifle conservative ideas and personalities.

In early July, a Louisiana Federal Judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.

Judge Terry Doughty wrote that he is likely to side with the plaintiffs, attorney generals from two Republican-led states, on the merits of their case and restricted correspondence between government actors and big tech companies — apart from matters of criminal activity or national-security threats — until the case is resolved.

"The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition," Doughty wrote in court filings published at the time. "Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden's policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true. All were suppressed."

"It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country," the judge added.