Wall Street Journal: Meta/Facebook Complicit With Biden White House "Pressure" To Remove COVID19 Posts

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Facebook Bowed to White House Pressure, Removed Covid Posts

.....Internal Meta emails say pressure from Washington was behind a decision to take down posts attributing pandemic to man-made virus...Facebook removed content related to Covid-19 in response to pressure from the Biden administration, including posts claiming the virus was man-made, according to internal company communications viewed by The Wall Street Journal......The emails show Facebook executives discussing how they managed users’ posts about the origins of a pandemic that the administration was seeking to control. “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made,” asked Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, in a July 2021 email to colleagues.....“We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it....”

.....The discussion took place three months after Facebook, which is owned by Meta Platforms, decided to stop banning posts asserting that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, in light of increasing debate about the virus’s origin.....The email, and a number of other such internal company communications, were obtained by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating what GOP lawmakers say is the Biden administration’s improper efforts to censor Americans’ speech on social media about Covid and other topics...... Facebook has long said that its content-moderation decisions are independent and not made with regard to politics. A spokesman declined to comment for this article.....

.....“There is likely a significant gap between what the WH would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing,” the Facebook vice president said.....As one example, the executive listed the White House’s desire that the company take action against humorous or satirical content that suggested the vaccines aren’t safe......“The WH has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed if it is premised on the vaccine having side effects, so we expect it would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed....I can’t see Mark in a million years being comfortable with removing that—and I wouldn’t recommend it,” Clegg wrote in a subsequent email, an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In some of the emails, Facebook executives expressed concern that removing posts in which Americans expressed hesitation about getting vaccinated could actually make them less likely to get a shot....“There may be risk of pushing them further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions,” said one draft memo to Facebook leadership.....

.....Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chair of the House panel, said “these documents begin to reveal the pressure that Facebook and other social-media companies were under to alter their content-moderation policies and remove protected speech to appease the federal government, particularly the Biden White House.”..Earlier Thursday, Jordan canceled a committee vote on whether to recommend that Zuckerberg be held in contempt of Congress for not turning over documents about the company’s communications with the government. The company has been turning over additional documents this week and says it has made nearly a dozen witnesses available for testimony.....“While these documents are jarring, they are just the beginning of the story,” Jordan said. “We expect Facebook to continue to produce documents, and if not, contempt remains on the table....”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bowed-to-white-house-pressure-removed-covid-posts-2df436b7

Archived Link

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[Patented Phil 1,469]

Government controlling the flow of information…  And no one on the Left is speaking out about it.

Like Maya said, “When someone show you who they be the first time, believe dat shitt the first time.”

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Fauci secretly went to CIA HQ to ‘influence’ COVID-19 origins probe, House Republican alleges

.....“The information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters — without a record of entry — and participated in the analysis to ‘influence’ the Agency’s review,” Wenstrup said. “Our goal is to ensure the scientific investigative process regarding the origins of COVID-19 was fair, impartial, and free of alternative influence.”.....“The American people deserve the truth — to know the origins of the virus and whether there was a concerted effort by public health authorities to suppress the lab leak theory for political or national security purposes,” Wenstrup argues, demanding information related to the “movements of Dr. Fauci throughout the pandemic.”

Specifically, Wenstrup seeks documents and communications between HHS, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the US Marshals Service – assigned to protect Fauci – regarding the former White House coronavirus czar’s admittance or entry into any CIA owned, operated, or occupied buildings.....The new allegations come after a senior-level CIA officer-turned-whistleblower alleged to Congress earlier this month that the intelligence agency offered to pay off six analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.....The analysts, who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab, were allegedly asked to report that the virus jumped from animals to humans....The US intelligence community declassified its 10-page report on COVID origins in June, which found “biosafety concerns” and “genetic engineering” taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology....

https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/fauci-secretly-went-to-cia-hq-to-influence-covid-19-origins-probe-house-republican-alleges/

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Lab Leak Fight Casts Chill Over Virology Research

.....Questions about whether Covid leaked from a Chinese laboratory have cast a chill over American virus research, drying up funding for scientists who collect or alter dangerous pathogens and intensifying a debate over those practices.....The pullback has transformed one of the most highly charged fields of medical science. While some believe such experiments could fend off the next pandemic, others worry that they are more likely to start one.

At Pennsylvania State University, a proposal to infect ferrets with a mutant bird flu virus passed the federal government’s most rigorous biosafety review only to be rebuffed by the National Institutes of Health. Troy Sutton, the scientist behind the studies, said that health officials referred to the public controversy over the lab leak theory in advising him to pursue different experiments.....In Washington, international development officials pulled the plug this summer on a $125 million program to collect animal viruses on several continents after two senior Republican senators demanded that they end the project.

And elsewhere in the United States, nearly two dozen virologists, some of whom spoke anonymously for fear of jeopardizing funding or career prospects, described a professionwide retreat from sensitive experiments. Some said that they had stopped proposing such work because research plans were languishing in long and opaque government reviews. One virologist said that university administrators had asked him to remove his name from a study done with colleagues in China.

“The next flu pandemic is brewing in nature, but we have very little means of stopping it, very little means of identifying what the most dangerous viruses are,” said Dr. Sutton, the Penn State virologist. “This freight train is coming, and we need to do anything we can do to get ahead of that.”....To critics, the studies became a byword for reckless experiments that risked kindling horrific outbreaks for only modest scientific knowledge. Lab leaks were responsible for the last cases of smallpox, in 1978, and for infections among scientists in Asia with an earlier coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1, in 2003 and 2004.

.....Inside the N.I.H., the political feud took a toll, raising the cost to the agency of becoming embroiled in additional controversies. A flurry of Congressional requests soon piled up, as did more public records requests than usual.....The scrutiny seemed to make government scientists skittish. Dr. Sutton said his primary contact at the N.I.H. told him by phone in the summer of 2020 that the agency would not fund his ferret transmission studies and encouraged him to find other ways of studying the virus.....“They just said, ‘You know, there’s a lot of controversy about this kind of work in the news right now,’” Dr. Sutton recalled. “They weren’t comfortable funding it......”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/science/covid-lab-leak-research.html

[jonmx 2,424]

It would probably take hundreds of years for the virus to naturally mutate to these highly deadly variants.  Let's speed that up so Pfizer can make more money.  Of course we have already done much of that.  

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The suppression of inconvenient truths about COVID on Twitter

.....Pfizer and the White House engaged in behind-the-scenes efforts to pressure social media companies into censoring truthful information about COVID-19 and vaccines.....That’s the revelation now emerging from Twitter’s internal company communications, thrown open by new owner Elon Musk, as well as from the discovery process in a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by the states of Missouri and Louisiana together with several individual plaintiffs.....

White House director of digital media Rob Flaherty berated a Facebook executive in a March 14, 2021, email. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy — period,” Flaherty wrote. “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game.” Then, in a remark that had a distinctly gangster-like ring to it, Flaherty added, “This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

In his March 14 email, Flaherty linked to a Washington Post article that cited Facebook’s own research on “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy.” The Biden administration seemed to think Facebook was holding back some high-tech tool to control people’s words and thoughts. The subject line of Flaherty’s email was “You are hiding the ball.”....Under this government duress, Facebook promised policy changes. The executive wrote back to Flaherty a week later to say the company would be “removing vaccine misinformation” and also “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.”

Flaherty wrote again on April 9, demanding to know what the company was doing to ensure that it was not “making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” The White House official warned the Facebook executive not to backslide on information-control efforts. “I want some assurances,” Flaherty wrote. “Understood,” the Facebook executive meekly responded.....Independent journalist Alex Berenson, who was banned from Twitter after he reported truthful information about the waning efficacy of the COVID vaccine — a vaccine that brought Pfizer nearly half of its $81 billion in sales in 2021 — was invited by Musk to search the company’s internal correspondence and report on what he found.

He found that on Aug. 27, 2021, Scott Gottlieb “saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.”...The tweet came from Dr. Brett Giroir, who, like Gottlieb, is a former FDA commissioner. “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity by A LOT,” Giroir wrote. “There’s no science justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.” Giroir called on the CDC director and the president to “follow the science.”....The post was not misinformation, and it didn’t violate Twitter’s terms of service. But Gottlieb immediately began pulling strings to get it censored.....Berenson reports that Gottlieb, who was paid $365,000 by Pfizer in 2021, emailed Twitter’s top Washington lobbyist, Todd O’Boyle, who was also Twitter’s liaison to the White House. “This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote, complaining that Giroir drew a “sweeping conclusion” from one study in Israel. He told O’Boyle the tweet “will end up going viral and driving news coverage.”

.....O’Boyle used an internal communications channel at Twitter to rush Gottlieb’s email to the “Strategic Response” team, identifying Gottlieb as “the former FDA commissioner” without mentioning that he was also a highly paid board member at Pfizer. The Twitter team reviewed the tweet and found no violation of the company’s misinformation policy, but then slapped a “misleading” label on it anyway, sharply reducing its visibility......For the record, a significant number of extremely well qualified scientists and medical doctors disagreed with the government’s (and Pfizer’s) view that everyone should get a COVID vaccine.....Censorship prevented you from hearing that. Until now.

https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/15/twitter-files-shine-a-light-on-the-suppression-of-inconvenient-truths-about-covid/

[lod001 1,344]

ZuckerTerd getting out in front of an indictment for conspiracy to rig an election by totally blaming it all on biden. 

https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1828423591181922521

[RaiderHaters Revenge 4,237]

remember when this was right wing conspiracy?

 

[Baker Boy 1,687]

This is just one of many examples of how the last election was stolen.

[IndyColtsFan 325]

Our cities are burning.

[zsasz 361]

Meh. IF you're relying on getting news from Facebook....

[Dizkneelande 1,085]

3 hours ago, RaiderHaters Revenge said:

remember when this was right wing conspiracy?

 

I’ve lost count of how many turned out to be true 

[Fnord 2,051]

Damn am I glad Mr. Sanctimonious Wall of Text is gone.

[Maximum Overkill 1,739]

37 minutes ago, Fnord said:

Damn am I glad Mr. Sanctimonious Wall of Text is gone.

Haha, YOUR PRESIDENT bamboozled you and like a good little sheep YOU VAXXED UP. Why, because you were a good, scared little sheep. 

Good Boy  

Glad you're not angry about it.