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