In the early stages of the pandemic, Facebook removed posts suggesting Covid was man-made at the behest of the White House, newly released internal emails reveal.

"Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made," Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president of global affairs, wrote in a July 2021 email to coworkers obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

"We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more," the tech giant’s vice president of content policy responded, alluding to the White House. "We shouldn't have done it."

The exchange occurred three months after Facebook decided to end its policy of censoring posts questioning whether Covid-19 was the result of a Chinese virology lab leak.

The emails were initially obtained by the House Judiciary Committee after the panel subpoenaed Facebook as part of its investigation into government efforts to curtail speech on social media.

One April 2021 email sent by a Facebook employee on behalf of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged, "We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House."

That same month, Clegg informed his team at Facebook that senior Biden adviser Andy Slavitt was "outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove" a popular post. According to the Ohio Republican, the offensive content was a humorous meme that suggested vaccine recipients would be solicited to join class-action lawsuits in the future.

What did the Biden White House want removed?

A meme.

That's right, even memes weren't spared from the Biden White House's censorship efforts. pic.twitter.com/6BhDxTHsUi

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023

Recounting his conversation with Slavitt, Clegg wrote in a subsequent email that he challenged the White House’s demand, pointing out "that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US."

Nevertheless, Slavitt rejected the argument altogether, according to the high-ranking Facebook official: "he replied that the post directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way which demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden administration is try to reach."

Replying to Clegg's email, Facebook's vice president of public policy Brian Rice said that he saw Slavitt's demand as a "crossroads" and suggested to colleagues that it should inform their content-moderation practices going forward.

"Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House], and our internal methods too," Rice wrote in a reply to Clegg's email.

On some occasions, Facebook executives said they were concerned that cracking down on disfavored speech would only fuel distrust of vaccines and public-health authorities in general.

"There may be risk of pushing them further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions," said a draft memo to Facebook executives included in an April 2021 email obtained by the Journal.

By July 2021, President Biden was accusing platforms such as Facebook of "killing people" by refusing to censor "misinformation" related to the virus. "They're killing people," Biden said during a press conference at the time. "Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people."

The public and private pressure appears to have yielded results: weeks after Biden's comments, on August 2, 2021, Facebook leadership asked employees to "brainstorm some additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against…misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration."

When the White House demanded that Facebook remove a Covid-related Tucker Carlson video, Facebook refused but offered the olive branch of suppressing the clip's reach by 50 percent for seven days while the video was fact-checked, according to a "talking points" memo Clegg disseminated to his colleagues.

Clegg disseminated "talking points" drafted to relay to the White House after it did not ban a Tucker Carlson video – which did not violating any rules – that included the olive branch gesture that the clip received a "50% demotion for seven days" severely curtailing its reach.

The Biden administration reaffirmed its position on social-media content moderation during Thursday’s press briefing.

“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," press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

While the White House was pushing Facebook to crack down on posts suggesting Covid was man made, Dr, Anthony Fauci and fellow NIH officials were pushing leading virologists to rush a paper to publication dismissing the lab-leak theory as implausible, according to internal emails and slack messages exchanged by the authors of a widely cited paper which the administration and others relied on to push back on lab-leak speculation.

Those internal messages, which were obtained by the House Oversight Committee, reveal that while the virologists publicly brushed off the lab-leak theory at the behest of “higher ups” in government, they were privately expressing doubts about the natural-origin theory and felt the lab-leak alternative was very much a live possibility.

Meta has yet to respond to National Review's request for comment.