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It has been revealed that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration pressured Facebook to change its algorithm in order to reduce the visibility of conservative outlets such as the Daily Wire and boost the content of the New York Times and other legacy media.
The tech giant refused at first, but eventually caved amid increasing pressure from members of the administration and went about reducing the reach of certain posts.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan obtained copies of internal documents showing the pressure placed on the social media giant by Biden's then-Director of Digital Security, Rob Flaherty.
Flaherty told Facebook that he needed to explain to Biden "why there is misinfo on the internet" regarding Covid-19, and went on to suggest that Facebook could help by reducing the reach of the New York Post or slapping labels on its content.
He then suggested that Facebook should just kick people off the site, and pleaded with the company to "play ball" with the administration and abide by its requests.
Motivating the decision was an apparent belief that Americans were not smart enough to decipher what was true and false online.
"If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people," Flaherty asked. "You wouldn't have a mechanism to check the material impact?"
He went on to suggest that certain areas of the country were more likely to be succeptible to misinformation, claiming, "If someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB, it's truth."
Flaherty continued to pressure Facebook to stop pushing people towards "bad" content, and an employee eventually told him that while they couldn't remove such posts, the company could "contain" them.
Eventually, Facebook caved and went along with the Biden administration's wishes.
"We attack virality aspect through feed demotions," an employee explained. "We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn't meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts" or "posts questioning whether you should get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it's government overreach."
"We demote those," they continued. "That's not false information, but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it's a different approach. What we normally do it just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduced a middle ground."
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
The tech giant refused at first, but eventually caved amid increasing pressure from members of the administration and went about reducing the reach of certain posts.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan obtained copies of internal documents showing the pressure placed on the social media giant by Biden's then-Director of Digital Security, Rob Flaherty.
Flaherty told Facebook that he needed to explain to Biden "why there is misinfo on the internet" regarding Covid-19, and went on to suggest that Facebook could help by reducing the reach of the New York Post or slapping labels on its content.
He then suggested that Facebook should just kick people off the site, and pleaded with the company to "play ball" with the administration and abide by its requests.
Motivating the decision was an apparent belief that Americans were not smart enough to decipher what was true and false online.
"If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people," Flaherty asked. "You wouldn't have a mechanism to check the material impact?"
He went on to suggest that certain areas of the country were more likely to be succeptible to misinformation, claiming, "If someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB, it's truth."
Flaherty continued to pressure Facebook to stop pushing people towards "bad" content, and an employee eventually told him that while they couldn't remove such posts, the company could "contain" them.
Eventually, Facebook caved and went along with the Biden administration's wishes.
"We attack virality aspect through feed demotions," an employee explained. "We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn't meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts" or "posts questioning whether you should get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it's government overreach."
"We demote those," they continued. "That's not false information, but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it's a different approach. What we normally do it just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduced a middle ground."
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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