A top adviser for Vice President Kamala Harris, Rob Flaherty, played a key role in pressuring Facebook to suppress alleged “misinformation” related to COVID-19 and vaccinations.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans, and he expressed regret over this collaboration.
Internal communications revealed Flaherty’s efforts to coordinate with tech companies like Google to combat vaccine hesitancy and analyze misinformation trends.
In an email in April 2021, Flaherty told Google to “connect […] about the work you’re doing to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation,” according to the documents.
Also in April, Flaherty and Facebook employees colluded in how to censor negative information surrounding the vaccine and its side effects in order to convince more Americans to receive it.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to the House Judiciary Committee this week. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.
Despite these pressures, Zuckerberg emphasized that the decision to remove content remained with Facebook, stating that the government pressure was wrong.
