The Lacuna Project

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Exhibit 1133

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration (interim staff report)

Exhibit 1133 · Congressional staff report

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration (interim staff report)

[H]e was outraged – not too strong of a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post.

Majority staff report built on subpoenaed internal company emails from Meta, Alphabet and Amazon. It reproduces a Meta executive's April 2021 email describing a call with a White House senior adviser who was 'outraged' that Meta had not removed a post, and states that by the end of 2021 Facebook, YouTube and Amazon changed content-moderation policies 'in ways that were directly responsive to criticism from the Biden Administration'. That last sentence is the Committee's characterization. The report also says that Facebook and Amazon referred to the White House's efforts as 'pressure'.

Source
House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (majority staff)
Date
1 May 2024
Quoted from
Executive Summary, p. 1 (epigraph quoting a Meta email of April 2021)
Grade
Primary record
Document
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Biden-WH-Censorship-Report-final.pdf
Accessed
2026-11-10
Cited by
Findings citing this exhibit
Note
The epigraph is the Committee's rendering of a Meta internal email produced under subpoena (authentic as a Meta document by its production). The report's appendix PDF (Censorship-Industrial-Complex-WH-Report_Appendix.pdf) was not opened.

Cited by

Finding INF-4.5
Primary record Meta (26 August 2024) and Alphabet (23 September 2025) each wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that senior Biden administration officials pressed them in 2021 over COVID-19 content, and each wrote that the company made its own decisions on removal and enforcement.