The Post’s traffic from Facebook plunged by more than 50% in early 2021 after White House aide Rob Flaherty falsely accused America’s favorite tabloid of “churning out articles every day about people dying” from COVID-19 vaccines.
The suppression drive from the Biden White House came just five months after social media networks — including Facebook and Twitter — censored The Post’s coverage of Joe Biden’s links to his son Hunter’s business dealings in China and Ukraine that cited files on Hunter’s abandoned laptop. The companies later expressed regret for doing so.
“I’m curious — NY Post churning out articles every day about people dying. What is supposed to happen to that from policy perspective?” Flaherty told three Facebook officials on March 26, 2021, according to phone call notes published Thursday by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Flaherty, who left the White House in June after more than two years as director of digital strategy, pressed: “Does that article get a reduction, labels?”
A Facebook official replied: “Let’s go back to remove (outright misinfo), reduce (not benign, more sensationalism, eg claim vaccines create miscarriages, indirect discouragement), inform – levers are contingent on content type, who posted it.”
“We look at removing from recommendations, explorer, we want to take all this content out of that,” the Facebook rep added. “What we’re prioritizing in feed – want to make sure that anything we suspect is hitting skepticism, harmful topically but we can’t remove, we reduce.”
Flaherty pressed: “The question I have, if you’re applying these methodologies, where is it still breaking through? And to whom? If it’s still there, where is next whack a mole?”
A Facebook official replied, “We’re getting better at detecting (human, natural language processing) discouragement. We find COVID posts, then we identify posts that are explicit discouragement, or this is bullying for choosing to get vaccinated. What’s hard right now, we haven’t completed full detection path. We need to close gaps, that’s what we’re doing.” --->READ MORE HERE
On March 26, 2021, White House digital director Rob Flaherty e-mailed Facebook, asking what sort of restrictions the social-media company was going to put on the New York Post.
“I’m curious — NY Post churning out articles every day about people dying. What is supposed to happen to that from Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?”
What we were “churning out” was the occasional news piece about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine based on the information we had at the time (even as we also advocated for taking it in editorials).
So for those keeping score at home, social-media censorship of The Post included:
Saying we couldn’t publish Hunter Biden’s laptop because it was fake or hacked.
It was neither.
Censoring our speculation that COVID leaked from a lab.
It most likely did.
Trying to restrict our coverage of COVID, even though we were advocating for people to get the vaccine — while running stories about the questions everyone was asking. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
Pfizer awaits approval of new COVID-19 booster as hospitalizations rise
NYC legislation will regulate outdoor dining set ups, eliminate street sheds, limit winter options
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
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