Not Just Misinformation: In Emails to White House, Facebook Admits Suppressing ‘Often-True Content’ on COVID-19 Vaccines
Facebook told an official at the Biden White House that the Big Tech company not only suppressed misinformation but took action against the “virality” of “often-true content” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey released the documents earlier this week. Bailey obtained them through a court case, Missouri v. Biden, alleging that some of President Joe Biden’s top officials “colluded with Big Tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech under the First Amendment.”
“I want to protect Missourians and the freedoms they enjoy, which is why as attorney general, I will always defend the Constitution,” Bailey told The Daily Signal in an email Thursday. “This case is about the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with.”
“I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate,” the Missouri attorney general pledged.
In an email to the White House dated March 21, 2021, a Facebook staff member discussed “levers for tackling vaccine hesitancy content” with Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, and Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy.
“You also asked us about our levers for reducing virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” wrote the Facebook staffer, whose identity was redacted. “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable information. This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level because it is important for people to be able to discuss both their personal experiences and concerns about the vaccine, but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.”
“We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content,” the Facebook staffer added. He or she then promised, “More on this front as we proceed to implement.”
In this email to the White House, the Facebook representative admitted to preventing exposure of content that doesn’t violate Facebook’s policies—content that isn’t “actionable.” The staffer also suggested that the White House had asked Facebook to take these measures.
In an April 22, 2021, email, Flaherty told Google staff that the White House remains “concerned that Youtube [sic] is ‘funneling’ people into hesitance and intensifying people’s hesitancy. We certainly recognize that removing content that is unfavorable to the cause of increasing vaccine adoption is not a realistic—or even good—solution.”
The White House’s digital strategy chief added that combating vaccine hesitancy “is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH [White House],” an apparent reference to the president himself.
In an April 14, 2021, email to Facebook, Flaherty suggested the social media platform should take action to suppress Fox News host Tucker Carlson and conservative journalist Tomi Lahren.
“Since we’ve been on the phone—the top post about vaccines today is tucker [sic] Carlson saying they don’t work,” Flaherty wrote. “Yesterday was Tomi Lehren [sic] saying she won’t take one. This is exactly why I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like—if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with tucker [sic] Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then … I’m not sure it’s reduction!”
In a May 12, 2021, email, the White House’s Flaherty faulted Instagram, which Facebook owns, for failing to remove “bad information” from its search function. He appears aggressive in pushing for censorship.
“You know and I know that the universe of undecided people searching Instagram for ‘vaccines’—as compared to, say, Google—is probably low,” Flaherty wrote. “But ‘removing bad information from search’ is one of the easy, low-bar things you guys do to make people like me think you’re taking action. If you’re not getting that right, it raises even more questions about the high bar stuff.”
“You say in your note that you remove accounts that discourage vaccination from appearing in recommendations (even though you’re using ‘primarily’ to give yourself wiggle room),” Flaherty added. “You also said you don’t promote those accounts in search.”
Then Flaherty compared Instagram to other social media platforms.
“Youtube [sic], for their warts, has done pretty well at promoting authoritative info in search results while keeping the bad stuff off of those surfaces,” the White House official said. “Pinterest doesn’t even show you any results other than official information when you search for ‘vaccines.’ I don’t know why you guys can’t figure this out.”
These documents confirm the close relationship between the federal government and Big Tech companies revealed in the recently reported “Twitter Files.”
Internal Twitter documents, released under the direction of new CEO Elon Musk, showed the Justice Department and FBI pressuring tech companies such as Twitter to stifle and suppress “misinformation,” particularly on the COVID-19 pandemic. In some cases, Twitter executives and government officials took aim at scientists who shared their professional opinions on the social media platform.
The FBI also paid Twitter more than $3 million while the intelligence community was pressuring the tech company to suppress news about Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
Big Tech’s censorship has not abated, either. In December, YouTube removed a video presentation featuring two doctors and a Heritage Foundation expert, claiming the video violated its misinformation policy on COVID-19 vaccines. YouTube didn’t identify which of the four speakers supposedly had violated the policy.
Roger Severino, former director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services and currently vice president for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, called the move “Kafkaesque.” (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
“I wish I knew exactly what triggered YouTube’s ire, but they remain imperiously vague,” Severino told The Daily Signal. “It is Kafkaesque to be placed in YouTube jail and not be told what the alleged crime was or even who committed it.”
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Covid’s warped model: Injured people mean big business for Big Pharma
Rebecca Weisser
‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ That’s what Goldman Sachs analysts asked in an April 2018 report on ‘The Genome Revolution’. The analysts didn’t think so, arguing that there was little money to be made on ‘one shot cures’. But there is endless money to be made from chronically injured people, they argued.
A recent report analysing Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US up to November 2022 by the Phinance Technologies Team shows a dramatic increase in disabilities in people aged 16-64 which coincides with the rollout of the vaccines. Treating those people will certainly be a viable business model for Big Pharma for the foreseeable future.
How does this relate to the extraordinary level of injury and death that experts say the Covid vaccines are causing?
Dr Richard Ennos, a retired professor of evolutionary biology at Edinburgh University, is the latest eminent academic to call for the immediate withdrawal of the mRNA Covid vaccines writing that ‘Glaring safety signals are apparent, indicating harm to the lymph system, the heart and to female reproduction.’
Dr Ennos came to this conclusion after conducting a thorough analysis of detailed data collected by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) through its Covid-19 Yellow Card vaccine adverse event database which the agency finally agreed to release after stalling for more than 18 months. It claimed that it would be too onerous to pass on the raw data despite the fact that the raw data is sent immediately to Pfizer and Moderna.
Dr Ennos is scathing about the MHRA writing that its regular summary of Yellow card reporting has been ‘an exercise in defending the Covid-19 vaccines from criticism rather than defending the UK public from the Covid-19 vaccines’. He damns the reports as lacking any scientific rigour, not providing a single piece of statistical analysis to support conclusions and calls them ‘an affront to the huge number of individuals who have been injured or killed doing what they believe to be “the right thing”’.
Ennos dedicates his report to the innocent UK public and to the dedicated physicians who filed the Yellow Card reports, writing, ‘I would like you to know that your suffering and endeavours have not been in vain.’
The work of Ennos bookends an open letter sent by Dr Tess Lawrie in June 2021 to Dr. June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA, demanding the halt of the mass rollout of COVID vaccines after discovering a ‘high number of COVID-19 vaccine-attributed deaths and adverse drug reactions that have been reported via the Yellow Card system’.
Dr Ennos and Dr Lawrie are not alone. In the last fortnight Dr Joseph Fraiman, lead author of peer-reviewed research re-analysing the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccine trial data, called for an immediate suspension of the vaccines saying, ‘We have conclusive evidence that the vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac death.’ Before him, prominent UK cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, who also conducted a peer-reviewed study of the vaccines, called for their suspension. Top US cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough has also called for an immediate suspension of the vaccines saying, ‘I’m going to be very clear about this. The vaccine is killing people and it’s killing large numbers of people.’
Masanori Fukushima, a distinguished oncologist, professor emeritus at Kyoto University, and Director of the Translational Research Informatics Centre, agrees. Together with other eminent Japanese professors he has called for an immediate halt to the use of the mRNA vaccines which he describes as ‘an unprecedented disaster’ saying he can’t imagine how many people have really died in Japan and the report of 2,000 deaths is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
Masanori is a specialist in pharmacy-epidemiology, which he describes as the ‘study of stopping drug disasters’. He has been actively involved in evaluating the Covid vaccines and is planning to sue the Japanese government for refusing to disclose vital information that could save lives.
Masanori says he asked government officials to disclose Covid mortality in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated on 1 August 2022. After stalling for two months, they refused. Apparently, the government disclosed this information earlier and it had shown that in people under 65 years the mortality rate was lower for unvaccinated people than for vaccinated people. Masanori thinks this was embarrassing for the government so they have refused to disclose any further information.
Interestingly, from May to December 2022, the NSW government also disclosed Covid deaths by vaccine status and these statistics also showed a slightly lower rate of mortality for the unvaccinated compared with the vaccinated. Like Japan, NSW will also no longer disclose Covid deaths by vaccine status.
Yet when the Centres for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration investigated a possible link between Pfizer’s bivalent Covid/flu vaccine and an increased risk of stroke, they stated within days that it was ‘very unlikely’ that the vaccine was the cause. Yet as one pundit observed, the Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly investigated Bernie Madoff without finding evidence of fraud.
Part of the problem appears to be regulatory capture on a grand international scale.
Dr Raine gave a speech in which she boasted that the MHRA had gone from being a watchdog to being an ‘enabler’ and that in regulating the Covid vaccines the MHRA ‘tore up the rule book’.
In the US, there is a revolving door between big pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory agencies of whom Scott Gottlieb is only the most prominent example. He worked at the FDA, then in the private sector, returned to be FDA commissioner and since 2019 has served on the board of Pfizer. Similarly, Stephen Hahn served as the head of the FDA from 2019 to 2021 before becoming the chief medical officer of Flagship Pioneering, the venture firm behind Moderna.
Another problem is the fact that the vaccines have been authorised under emergency use authorisation in the US and provisionally in Australia, giving pharmaceutical companies indemnity which appears to have made them indifferent to the harms vaccines have caused. And control of social media by the Biden administration in the US and the Trusted News Initiative internationally have shielded vaccine manufacturers from almost all criticism. So far, it appears to be a more sustainable business model than curing patients.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/covids-warped-model
**************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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