White House ‘censored’ sceptical Covid jab posts

THE White House has been accused of pressuring social media companies into censoring sceptical posts about Covid vaccines, according to emails released as part of a legal case.

The emails were from a case in which the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, and several university professors, are suing the Biden administration. New emails showed that in March last year a White House official emailed a Facebook executive accusing the social media giant of “hiding the ball”.

The White House official wrote: “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period. 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.

“This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

Facebook wrote back that it was “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines”.

The details were published in The Wall Street Journal by Aaron Kheriaty, a former professor at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine, who is a plaintiff in the case.

He wrote: “The First Amendment bars [the] government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship.”