Zero Hedge reports that “Federal efforts to censor social media extend past discussions with companies like YouTube over broad guidelines about Covid-19 “misinformation.”” There is evidence that the FDA has specifically demanded suppression of individual posts.
In an April 30, 2021 email, the Food and Drug Administration director of social media, Brad Kimberly, told a Google lobbyist that the agency expected YouTube to pull a video touting the potential of a new monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid. (Google owns YouTube.)
“Overall, the video is very problematic when it comes to COVID misinformation,” Kimberly wrote to the lobbyist, Jan Fowler Antonaros.
“This video should be pulled.”
YouTube initially declined to remove the video. However, it has since been taken offline.
How often the FDA has made other censorship demands is unknown, because the agency is apparently hiding the existence of its efforts in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
In October, reporter Alex Berenson submitted a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request asking the FDA to disclose their communications with social media companies like Twitter and YouTube about censoring Covid “misinformation” in general.
On Nov. 30, the FDA responded it could not find any emails between its officials and social media companies that met the request.
“Yet at the bottom of the emails containing the agency’s discussions about me,” writes Berenson, “was the email between Kimberly and Antonaros – apparently attached there by accident, as it had nothing to do with me.”
APPARENTLY THE FDA IS LYING AND COVERING UP ITS CONTROL OVER SOCIAL MEDIA
The fact that the FDA’s exchange with Antonaros was slipped by accident into the bottom of documents–while FDA claimed it possessed no communications with social media–means the FDA is actively covering up its secret influence on social media censorship.
“[T]he agency said it had not found a single record responsive to that request – not one – even as it accidentally provided one.”
