Last year, the Biden administration discovered an Instagram account parodying Dr. Anthony Fauci. Not long after, an official reached out to parent company Meta. Mere seconds later, the Facebook owners took action.
The July 20, 2021, incident was found in a newly surfaced email exchange and reveals just how closely the Democrat White House and the social media giant worked together.
“Hi there – any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours,” wrote Clarke E. Humphrey, digital director for the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response team in an email time-stamped 1:24 p.m.
Literally 46 seconds later, Humphrey got a reply, simply reading “Yep, on it!” The recipient’s name is redacted on the released email, but the time stamp on the reply is 1:24:46 p.m. and appears to denote the same time zone.
Humphrey also included others in the email about the satire account, including Rob Flaherty, deputy assistant to the president and director of digital strategy.
Fauci is retiring this year from his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden.
The document was only discovered after Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the Department of Justice in Louisiana District Court and forced it to turn over communications between high-ranking Biden officials in the White House, Department of State, FBI, and others, and major social media companies.
The attorneys general are hoping that they might be able to expose how top Biden officials may have colluded with social media companies in an attempt to censor free speech on multiple topics, particularly on the topic of COVID-19. The DOJ has turned over communications between federal officials and social media companies, but refused to do so for any high-level government officials.
“We won in court in July, and the Court required the Biden Administration to turn over communications between federal officials and social media companies,” Schmitt said in a statement. “We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done,” he continued.
Although social media companies are not part of the government and cannot be charged with violating the First Amendment, Schmitt and Landry believe if they can prove that certain opinions, statements, and beliefs were censored at the behest of the government, it would constitute a “censorship enterprise,” which would violate federal law.
“Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials—including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the White House—have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories to Defendants,” Schmitt and Landry said in a joint statement. “YouTube disclosed eleven federal officials engaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by Defendants.”
The censorship enterprise “rises to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, including numerous White House officials,” Schmitt and Landry said.
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