In one damning email, an unnamed Facebook executive wrote to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg:
We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content.
We see repeatedly in internal communications not only in the email above, but in the Twitter Files, in the exhibits of the Missouri v Biden lawsuit, and even in the Freedom of Information request results beginning to trickle in here at Racket, that the news media has for some time been working in concert with civil society organizations, government, and tech platforms, as part of the censorship apparatus.
In the summer of 2021, the White House and Joe Biden were in the middle of a major factual faceplant. They were not only telling people the Covid-19 vaccine was a sure bet — “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations” is how Biden put it — but that those who questioned its efficacy were “killing people.” But the shot didn’t work as advertised. It didn’t prevent contraction or transmission, something Biden himself continued to be wrong about as late as December of that year.
If you go back and give a careful read to corporate media content from that time describing the administration’s war against “disinformation,” you’ll see outlets were themselves not confident the vaccine worked. Take the New York Times effort from July 16th, 2021, “They’re Killing People: Biden Denounces Social Media for Virus Disinformation.” You can see the Timestiptoeing around what they meant, when they used the word “disinformation.” In this and other pieces they used phrases like, “the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation,” “how to track misinformation,” “the prevalence of misinformation,” even “Biden’s forceful statement capped weeks of anger in the White House over the dissemination of vaccine disinformation,” but they repeatedly hesitated to say what the misinformation was.