Facebook officials removed some COVID-19 content after being pressured by the Biden administration, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Deleted posts included ones claiming the virus was man-made, according to internal company emails viewed by the Journal.
One example involved a July, 2021, email from Nick Clegg, the company's president of global affairs, to colleagues.
"Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man made," Clegg asked.
A Facebook vice president in charge of content policy responded: "We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. We shouldn't have done it."
That email exchange — obtained by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee — took place three months after Meta's Facebook decided to stop banning posts asserting that COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured.
At the time, the President Joe Biden and the administration was encouraging Americans to get vaccinated for COVID, and used public and private campaigns to get Facebook to police vaccine-related content.
"These documents begin to reveal the pressure that Facebook and other social-media companies were under to alter their content-moderation policies and remove protected speech to appease the federal government, particularly the Biden White House," said House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the Journal reported.
Jordan canceled a committee vote Thursday on whether to recommend that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg be held in contempt of Congress for not turning over documents about the company's communications with the government.
The Journal reported that Facebook this week has been turning over additional documents and says it has made nearly a dozen witnesses available for testimony.
"While these documents are jarring, they are just the beginning of the story," Jordan said, the Journal reported. "We expect Facebook to continue to produce documents, and if not, contempt remains on the table."
Facebook has insisted its content-moderation decisions are independent and not made with regard to politics, the Journal reported.
The White House claims it was focused on promoting the adoption of public-health goals, including vaccines.
"We have consistently made it clear that we believe social-media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on the American people, while making independent decisions about the content of their platforms," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday.
In July, 2021, Biden said false information seen on Facebook was "killing people."
That comment contributed to Facebook reevaluating its policies about COVID content.
High-level company officials including Clegg and then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg were involved in the discussions, the Journal reported.
Before meeting the U.S. surgeon general to discuss vaccine misinformation in late July, 2021, Clegg emailed colleagues: "My sense is that our current course — in effect explaining ourselves more fully, but not shifting on where we draw the lines … is a recipe for protracted and increasing acrimony."
"Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration — data flows etc. — that doesn't seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns," Clegg said, the Journal reported.
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