Instagram immediately complied with a Biden White House request to remove a fake account that parodied Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to emails obtained by Republican-run states that have sued the federal government for allegedly colluding with top social media sites.
In July of last year, Clarke Humphrey, the White House digital director of the COVID-19 response team, wrote an email to an official at Instagram asking the Meta-owned social media platform to take down the fake account.
“Any way we can get this pulled down?” Humphrey asks in the email. “It is not actually one of ours.”
The time stamp on the email was 1:24 p.m.
“Yep, on it!” an Instagram official replies soon afterward. It took less than a minute for the Instagram official to reply.
The site poking fun at Fauci was taken down. It is unclear who operated the parody account.
In May, the attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana filed suit against President Biden and other top White House officials, accusing them of violating the First Amendment.
The administration was accused of “working with social media giants such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor and suppress free speech, including truthful information, related to COVID-19, election integrity, and other topics, under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation’.”
The lawsuit accuses the federal government of “having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left.”
The Biden administration was engaged in “open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content,” according to the lawsuit.
“Ripped from the playbook of Stalin and his ilk, Biden has been colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech and propagandize the masses,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said.
“We are fighting back to ensure the rule of law and prevent the government from unconstitutional banning, chilling, and stifling of speech.”
The Post has sought comment from the White House as well as from Instagram’s parent company, Meta.
Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser and the federal government’s top expert on infectious diseases, recently announced that would retire after 38 years as director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Criticism of Fauci and other public health officials has been fierce, particularly among Republicans and their supporters who say that COVID lockdown measures such as closing schools, shuttering businesses and imposing vaccine mandates were excessive and unnecessary.
The lawsuit against Biden’s administration further fuels perceptions that Big Tech firms are acting to crack down on conservative free speech at the behest of the Biden administration.
Twitter, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube and other sites have been known to de-platform individuals such as former President Donald Trump, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and the British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that Facebook erred in banning the sharing of The Post’s exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Zuckerberg told Rogan that the FBI had warned Meta and other social media companies of potential Russian disinformation campaigns, which led the company to suppress stories about Hunter Biden.
Republicans have vowed to use subpoena power to investigate tech firms and their handling of the Hunter Biden story if they capture the majority in the House of Representatives following this year’s midterm elections in November.
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