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11 months ago
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Republicans are hauling in two former White House officials to talk about censorship on social media.
Robert Flaherty, the former White House digital strategist who is now Biden's deputy campaign manager, and Andrew Slavitt, the former senior advisor to the Biden administration's pandemic response team, have been hit with subpoenas by Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan.
Flaherty is at the center of a case where the Biden administration is accused of pressuring social media companies to take down posts they deem to be misinformation.
In September the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans said the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC and the FBI cannot 'coerce' social media platforms to take down posts the government doesn't like.
Republicans are hauling in two former White House officials to talk about censorship on social media
The opinion noted that, at least since early 2021, 'a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of 'misinformation' on their platforms.'
Those platforms included Facebook, Twitter (now known as X), YouTube, and Google, which were peppered with government requests to remove content, the judges found.
At one point, a White House official told an unnamed platform to take a post down 'ASAP,' and instructed it to 'keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre,' according to the filing.
The topics spotlighted in the suit included COVID-19 vaccines, the Wuhan lab leak theory, the FBI's handling of Hunter Biden's laptop, and election fraud allegations.
But last month the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the lower court ruling that would have curbed the Biden administration's ability to communicate with social media companies.
It agreed to take up the government's appeal in full at some point in its term.
Jordan had requested Flaherty and Slavitt appear over the summer, but they rebuffed. Now with the weight of a subpoena the pair are further pressured to oblige.
In his letter the chairman said he found Flaherty and Slavitt had played a 'central role' in communicating the Biden White House's censorship efforts to social media companies, 'including the White House's demands to censor true information, memes, satire, and other constitutionally protected forms of expression.'
The subpoenas dropped a year after the so-called 'Twitter Files' were released, unveiling the companies' censorship policies before the takeover of Elon Musk.
That prompted a congressional hearing where Jordan brought in Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, two who were given access to the files. Taibbi is testifying again in a second censorship hearing on Thursday.
'To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of new statutory limits on the Executive Branch's ability to work with social media platforms and other companies to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee must first understand the nature of this collusion and coercion,' the letters to Flaherty and Slavitt read.
Documents obtained by the Judiciary Committee revealed Flaherty worked closely with Google-owned Youtube on taking down information that could cause vaccine skepticism.
Flaherty wrote in an email, first obtained by Fox Business, to Google team members in April 2021 that he wanted to 'connect … about the work you're doing to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation.'
Flaherty asked about trends around Covid misinformation on the site and offered to have White House-endorsed Covid experts partner with Youtube to create content.
Google noted after meeting with Flaherty that he was 'particularly dug in on our decision making for borderline content,' meaning content that does not violate community guidelines but brushes up against the line.
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