And once YouTube (Google) relented to censoring more content, the Biden White House used that as leverage to further increase the pressure on Facebook to do the same.

Remember how the Biden White House was “outraged” that Facebook didn’t censor a meme?

In that same April 2021 “hour long call,” Biden White House Senior Advisor Andy Slavitt warned Nick Clegg, Facebook’s President for Global Affairs, that “YT has made significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy whilst [Facebook has] lagged behind.”

That’s right. The Biden Admin praised Google for censoring Americans while criticizing Facebook. In an internal Facebook email obtained by @JudiciaryGOP & @Weaponization, Clegg described his call with the Biden White House regarding censorship.

The email reveals that Nick Clegg—former UK Deputy Prime Minister—tried to reason with the Biden White House that, under America’s First Amendment, “removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US.”

But the Biden White House was unmoved, and the response to Facebook was clear: you need to be like Google and YouTube and censor more.

In response to the White House’s demands, Clegg asked his colleagues at Facebook to check whether the content is available on YouTube because the White House’s “assumption is that [YouTube] would never accept something like this.”

But why did Facebook and Google/YouTube relent to the White House’s pressure? Because the companies had other policy priorities that they feared the White House could use as leverage against them.

Facebook executives warned that they had “bigger fish to fry.”

Meanwhile, the Google/YouTube Gov’t Affairs team cautioned that they were “seek[ing] to work closely with [the Biden] administration on multiple policy fronts.”