How the U.S. Government and Social Media Stifled the Covid Conversation

T he release of internal Twitter communications, thanks to the actions of the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, has provided the public with a unique view of how our government, in coordination with large, powerful corporations, intentionally suppressed dissenting opinions and ideas about Covid and Covid policies. Amid our vigorous and often angry debates over the pandemic and the way it was handled, political actors were working with Twitter to limit the speech of certain voices challenging what had become the “official” line.

In a December release of one batch of the Twitter Files, journalist David Zweig revealed how the Trump and Biden administrations both actively pushed social media to suppress the opinions of certain scientists, thinkers, and physicians in their discussions of the U.S. public-health policy response to the pandemic. Politicians, it became clear, wanted to stop the spread of science-based dissent from their policies, setting a dangerous new precedent in America. This startling bipartisan effort to shape public debate over such a critical issue shows how the levers of our government have become corrupt, regardless of who holds power.

Zweig presented emails and texts between federal-government officials and Twitter executives, starting in 2020 and continuing until the summer of 2022. Zweig explains: “It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.” For example, early in 2020, Trump officials tried to get Twitter to censor accounts that were spreading what they deemed misinformation. Their goal was to prevent fear and thus panic-buying of groceries and basic medical supplies. The effort to use the power of the executive to limit or outright censor dissenting views accelerated upon the election of Joe Biden.

In an astounding abuse of power, the Biden administration actively and directly targeted and tried to suppress debate regarding Covid-19 science, intentionally trying to punish or silence anyone whom they considered a dissenting voice.  This was most prominent with the release of email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives. The emails prove definitively that social-media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, were badgered and pressured to restrict free speech and impose Covid censorship policies promoted by high-level officials within the White House.

As has been well documented in the Twitter Files, Flaherty repeatedly, over a period of weeks and months, threatened and cajoled executives at Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and other sites to dramatically restrict free expression of any individuals that disagreed with the White House stance on coronavirus policy. From the Wall Street Journal:

These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.

This use of political pressure was not limited to lower-level staffers in the West Wing. White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and even President Biden himself directly advocated such censorship. As the WSJ reported, “on July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his ‘message to platforms like Facebook.’ He replied, ‘They’re killing people.’ Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.” From within our federal government came repeated, organized pressure to coerce — possibly illegally — private companies to censor the free speech of Americans whose positions deviated from government-approved messaging. This very well may be the most sustained and organized effort of censorship in modern American history.

And it’s not just inside the Beltway: Last year, the government of California passed a law that prohibits doctors from spreading Covid “misinformation.” Putting aside the downright un-American and authoritarian aspects of this effort to suppress certain views, we arrive at another core problem: What exactly is misinformation? Twitter executives, in cahoots with government officials, deemed certain opinions to be misinformation not because these views were at odds with science but simply because they were at odds with the government narrative.

But we have another major problem regarding misinformation: Government officials have been spreading untrue information for the entirety of the pandemic. This, of course, started under Trump, but Biden and his staff have clearly been involved in their own misinformation campaigns.

The examples are plentiful. The most familiar one, by now, is Covid adviser Anthony Fauci’s misinformation about masks: In early 2020, he proclaimed that people did not need them to protect themselves from the virus. He later admitted that he’d said this because he and other policy-makers were worried about depleting supplies of high-grade masks needed by medical professionals. But that worry doesn’t change the fact that he was actively misinforming the public on the matter.

In 2021, current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky repeatedly, and on numerous occasions, proclaimed that the Covid vaccines could prevent transmission of the virus. Fauci said this, too. This unscientific misstatement was repeated by President Biden in July 2021. No evidence or data supported such a statement, but the misinformation was disseminated nonetheless. In fact, it was on the basis of this misinformation that the Biden administration pushed for vaccine mandates, even after the claim that vaccines prevent transmission had been disproven.

These are but a few of the examples of government misinformation on Covid, which the American people were asked to accept as “science.” And yet we are expected to excuse those in power for their misstatements.

The pandemic-driven interest in censorship as a tool of government will not simply end with the Biden administration, now that the pandemic has wound down. Once such authoritarian powers become tolerated by the public, their use will spread. There is now a pervasive belief, especially among the American political Left, that the elites controlling the levers of government power have not only a right but a duty to suppress information flowing to the American public. We learned from the Twitter Files, for example, that Congressman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) used the power of his elected office to suppress the speech of Americans he disagrees with. Journalist Matt Taibbi documented that Schiff demanded that Twitter executives suspend the accounts of various political voices he deemed dangerous.

The arrogance and lack of humility among these leaders is one of the key reasons why skepticism and distrust have been growing among the American people. One cannot call it paranoia when the public, suspecting that its leaders are not being honest, is shown evidence that their leaders were in fact lying.

The Biden administration, from the president on down, owes the American people full transparency, accountability, and public apologies for their behavior. Their un-American suppression of dissent is not only a disgrace in a free country, but it also might have cost lives. The eternal quest for knowledge in science depends on vigorous, open, honest debate carried on freely and without threat of punishment. Debates by their very nature will often reveal certain claims to have been false. That is literally how the scientific method works: eliminating the ideas that are wrong to truly learn what is right.

Donald Trump and his administration certainly started this process early in the pandemic, but their scattershot attempts to restrict messaging pale in comparison to his successor’s attempt at censorship. And in that sense, Biden and his administration continue to fail the American people. Americans should demand that their leaders be held to account for this affront to the First Amendment.