Joe Biden stood in front of cameras in July 2021 and accused social media companies of killing people.
Newly released Freedom of Information Act documents reveal what was happening behind closed doors at that exact moment.
Biden's censors were writing things down that they never expected the public to read.
Biden White House Ordered Facebook to Remove True Vaccine Side Effect Reports
Vivek Murthy was Biden's Surgeon General – the man who stood beside Anthony Fauci as the official voice of American public health throughout the COVID pandemic.
A memo to Murthy's internal "misinformation tiger team" – written by his own staff, not leaked by a whistleblower – celebrated Marjorie Taylor Greene's temporary suspension from social media as "momentum" toward removing more accounts.
Protect the Public's Trust, a good governance watchdog, obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared them exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
According to the group's communications director Alexa Moutevelis, the documents reveal an administration so consumed by its campaign against "misinformation" that it risked other priorities – all in service of controlling what Americans could say.
The same internal memo acknowledged that the censorship campaign "politicizes office by further engaging in social media/censorship war" – and Murthy's own staff wrote it down knowing exactly what they were doing.
A Facebook employee captured the entire scheme in one sentence during the congressional investigation: "The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects."
Not misinformation – true information.
The scope went far beyond disputed vaccine claims – Murthy's office was flagging memes, jokes, and content its team simply did not like.
Murthy's prepared talking points directed him to tell Americans that the unvaccinated were a threat to their families and coworkers – while his aides told him to avoid giving the public "minute details" about the FDA approval process.
Murthy's job was not to inform Americans about the vaccine – it was to sell it.
Facebook's own executives privately called the Biden administration's actions a "pressure" campaign to censor opinions the government disfavored.
The Censorship Industrial Complex Was Never Just About COVID
COVID was never the end game.
Murthy's policy adviser Daniel Tartakovsky spelled it out in a May 2021 email: the surgeon general did not see this as a COVID issue – it was "health and medical misinformation," full stop, with no boundaries and no off switch.
This was a permanent federal apparatus for controlling what Americans could read about their own health.
Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs and the man who managed Facebook's relationship with Washington, understood that the government's demands violated the First Amendment – and complied anyway, telling colleagues that Facebook had "bigger fish we have to fry" with the government.
Biden applied the pressure from the podium while Murthy applied it directly on social media companies, and every American who got suspended for questioning COVID policies was caught in a censorship operation that its own participants admitted was political.
A Senate subcommittee formally accused the Biden administration of running a coordinated censorship campaign targeting conservative speech.
The Trump administration settled the lawsuit in May 2026, calling it "an important milestone in the battle for free speech in our country" – but these new documents show the story was even larger than the lawsuit covered.
Inside Biden's Plan to Make Government Censorship Permanent
Murthy's office wanted more than the power to silence Americans – they wanted Facebook's user data, and when they could not get it, they intended to use regulatory pressure to force the platform open.
The congressional investigation had already established that the same apparatus suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story – factual reporting buried by government-coerced platforms three weeks before the 2020 election.
What these documents prove, in the government's own handwriting, is that Biden used a public health emergency as a testing ground for political censorship – and then planned to keep the operation running long after COVID was gone.
That is not a conspiracy theory – that is a policy memo.
The bureaucrats who built this apparatus are gone, but the documents they left behind are now public.
And every American who was banned, mocked, or fired for questioning the official COVID narrative deserves to know one thing: the surgeon general's own team admitted in writing that it was political.
Sources:
- Emily Kopp, "EXCLUSIVE: COVID Was Just A Warm-Up For Biden's 'Censorship-Industrial Complex,'" Daily Caller News Foundation, October 19, 2026.
- Alexa Moutevelis, Statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation, Protect the Public's Trust, October 2026.
- U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Congressional Investigation Records, 2023.
- "Trump Administration Settles Social Media Censorship Case," The Hill, May 2026.
