Over the past month, the Biden administration has castigated Facebook for hosting COVID-19 misinformation before abruptly softening its criticism. While Facebook forcefully defended its existing misinformation mitigation measures, the episode illustrates how government can circumvent the First Amendment by bullying private middlemen. Pressuring publishers to suppress speech is not a new problem, but the inherent inconsistency of content moderation on massive social media platforms makes it harder to detect this method of censorship. Even when platforms resist government demands, they can undermine trust in private content moderation.
President Biden first claimed that Facebook was “killing people,” by hosting vaccine misinformation. He later walked that back, saying “Facebook isn’t killing people, these 12 people are out there giving misinformation,” referring to twelve accounts identified by a British NGO. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed that the administration had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” and said that “Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts.” However, she later professed “we’ve not asked Facebook to block any individual posts.” While one of these contradictory statements must itself be misinformation, the administration’s public statements are, by themselves, an end run around the First Amendment.
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