Paul Thacker | 11 Aug 2023

A Facebook employee emailed CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg in April 2021 to ask if the company should take more aggressive action against accounts raising questions about the COVID vaccines. “We are facing continued press from external stakeholder, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content.”

Like so many other Twitter and Facebook internal company communications made public in the last year, this email adds further evidence that the White House was pressuring companies to censor messages that ran counter to Biden administration vaccine policies. But noting that the press was also pressuring Facebook to censor people makes another fact evident: media companies approve of censorship and are in the tank for the biopharmaceutical industry.

Of course, this has been obvious throughout the pandemic. Pfizer and Moderna have needed to spend little money on marketing, because reporters have been doing advertising for them.