More reverberations are being felt with the drop of the Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook/Meta censorship regret letter. The letter revealed that former White House Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty was the main person who pushed Zuck and other Big Tech platforms like Google to censor speech they didn’t agree with.
Now Flaherty is Kamala Harris’ Deputy Campaign Manager. What does that say about a potential Harris-Walz administration and how they will handle freedom of speech?
We already know the answer to that.
FLASHBACK: A current top campaign adviser for VP Kamala Harris was deeply involved in pushing Facebook to suppress “misinformation” in an effort to control the political narrative on COVID and other issues.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a letter on Monday while expressing regret that his company, Facebook, was pressured by the Biden-Harris administration to censor Americans, particularly regarding COVID-19 content, bringing to the forefront actions taken by Harris’ deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty as part of that pressure campaign.
Flaherty, who previously served as the White House director of digital strategy, helped lead the campaign to target alleged “misinformation” relating to the COVID-19 virus and its vaccinations, FOX Business previously reported.
Flaherty emailed Google team members in April 2021 to “connect […] about the work you’re doing to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation,” according to the documents.
The Zuckerberg story was big:
The White House pressured Meta to illegally censor factual information about COVID and Hunter’s laptop.
Even bigger:
The person responsible for this was former Director of Digital Strategy @Rob_Flaherty.
He’s now Kamala’s Deputy Campaign Manager. pic.twitter.com/hfMUdmStJA
— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) August 28, 2024
Republican VP candidate JD Vance is already honing in, and if you’re Harris-Walz, the last thing you need is JD Vance’s laser focus. Vance can successfully articulate nine ways to Sunday how fraudulent the Harris-Walz campaign is on the subject and how if they attain the White House, it would be a huge blow to Americans’ right to free speech. One thing can be said for sure: the next few weeks’ Trump campaign rallies and pressers are gonna be lit.
This is a massive story. Kamala Harris’s administration encouraged Facebook to censor information about Donald Trump.
President Trump will fight for your ability to speak your mind.
Kamala Harris would rather shut you up than persuade you. Some leaderhttps://t.co/seNxdcZxoe
— JD Vance (@JDVance) August 28, 2024
You have a MN Governor Tim Walz who instituted a COVID snitch hotline, then you have VP Kamala Harris, the “co-president,” hiring the head of censorship for the White House as her campaign manager. Are they just really bad at this, or do they think they can ride on vibes and joy all the way to the White House? This is not a good look.
Flaherty was grilled by the House Committee on the Weaponization of Federal Government just three months ago, and not only couldn’t recite the tenets of the First Amendment but had amnesia or was muted in his response to Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) bringing the receipts of Flaherty’s written and verbal commitment to censorship of American speech and forcing the social media companies to comply by any means necessary. Flaherty was also quite adept at dodging the House subpoenas to get him to come in and testify.
WATCH:
Like VP Harris and her past remarks as San Francisco DA, California AG, and Senator/2020 presidential candidate, there is more video of Flaherty waxing eloquent about how he feels about misinformation, fake news, and dealing with social media.
Flaherty continued asking for trends surrounding vaccine misinformation on the website, while offering government assistance in the form of COVID experts at the White House to partner in product work with YouTube.
Google, in an internal email, noted that after a subsequent meeting with Flaherty, the White House staffer “particularly dug in on our decision making for borderline content” – which is content that doesn’t cross Community Guidelines but rather brushes up against it, according to YouTube.
A week later, Google acknowledged that it sent the White House the total amount of videos removed for COVID vaccine misinformation, while discussing the government’s desire for even more data.
“Really [Flaherty’s] interested in what we’re seeing that is NOT coming down,” read an internal Google email between employees, seemingly referring to videos that had not yet been removed.
According to a 2023 Fox Business article, Flaherty even asked Facebook in 2021 to give government agencies “tools for special access” in order to target users.
