Flashback: Vice President Kamala Harris' current campaign advisers were deeply involved in pressuring Facebook to curb “misinformation” in order to control political discourse around COVID-19 and other issues.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter on Monday that his company, Facebook, had come under pressure from the Biden-Harris Administration to censor Americans, particularly around COVID-19-related content, and expressed regret over actions taken by Harris' deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty as part of that pressure campaign.
Flaherty, who previously served as the White House director of digital strategy, led the campaign targeting alleged “misinformation” about the COVID-19 virus and its vaccinations, Fox Business previously reported.
According to the documents, Flaherty emailed Google team members in April 2021 to “communicate about the work we are doing to combat vaccine hesitancy and crack down on vaccine misinformation.”
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Vice President Harris' aides have previously helped pressure tech companies to curb certain speech on social media. (Getty Images)
Flaherty continued to ask about trends in vaccine misinformation on the website and offered government assistance in the form of a White House COVID expert and a product development partnership with YouTube.
In an internal email, Google said that after a subsequent meeting with Flaherty, White House staff “particularly pressed us about decision-making regarding borderline content,” which YouTube says is content that comes close to but doesn't violate its community guidelines.
A week later, Google acknowledged that it had sent the total number of videos it had removed for COVID vaccine misinformation to the White House and discussed the government's desire for more data.
“[Flaherty]is genuinely interested in seeing what videos haven't been removed,” one Google employee-to-employee email said, appearing to refer to videos that have not yet been deleted.
According to internal communications viewed by FOX Business and reported in 2023, Flaherty asked Facebook in 2021 whether it could give government agencies special access to tools to target users.
“In the context of a global pandemic, is it possible to give ad agencies access to targeting parameters that they normally don't have access to?” Flaherty asked.
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Robert Flaherty will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on May 1. (House of Representatives Judiciary Committee)
The idea came during a conversation about how to convince people worried about side effects of the COVID vaccine to get vaccinated.
During an April 5 conference call, Facebook employees said that if someone was worried about getting a nosebleed as a side effect of the vaccine, they would ideally be directed to information that addressed that concern. “Can we provide resources to you?” Flaherty asked the Facebook team.
Another Facebook employee responded that actions such as offering targeted resources to address their concerns could incite people, saying “we need to be careful how we approach that.”
“If people are having the conversation, you have to allow that to happen. Direct them to the CDC. And what happens then?” Flaherty asked.
“We all know someone who has had the experience of feeling like Facebook is listening to their conversations,” a Facebook employee responded.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously claimed that Facebook had suppressed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about COVID-19. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Facebook employees told Flaherty that while instantly generating a message about a nosebleed might give users a “Big Brother vibe,” the company might delay the content to avoid raising alarm bells among users.
“We have to pay attention to those conversations and make sure people see the information, even if it's not appropriate at the time,” the Facebook employee said.
Flaherty engaged in a tense exchange with Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan at a congressional hearing earlier this year, during which he claimed Elon Musk had “not faced any adverse government action” for changing the company's censorship policies.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and the Harris-Waltz campaign for comment but did not receive a response.
“Ultimately, our decision whether to remove content is ours and we take responsibility for our decisions, including the COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement approach in response to this pressure,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee this week. “We believe the government pressure was misguided, and we regret that we did not speak out more.”
Fox News Digital's Hilary Vaughn and Chase Williams contributed to this report.
