The Biden administration’s “Censorship-Industrial Complex” had grander ambitions than controlling just what Americans said about COVID-19, new documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — who served as the “nation’s doctor” shoulder-to-shoulder with Anthony Fauci during the COVID pandemic — sought to apply “maximum pressure” on social media companies like Meta and to broadly manage “health and medical misinformation” across American society.
In May 2026, the Trump administration announced a settlement agreement in its lawsuit over the suppression of conservatives’ First Amendment rights, championing it as “an important milestone in the battle for free speech in our country.”
The documentsdraw from the summer of 2021, when the Censorship-Industrial Complex was at the height of its powers.
Murthy did not reply to requests for comment.
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Elon Musk’s collaborationwith journalists to reveal the “Twitter Files” and a congressional investigation into Meta, the owner of Facebook, revealed internal company communications about the censorship regime. The new documents reveal more about the government’s side of the pressure campaign.
Protect the Public’s Trust, a nonpartisan good governance group, obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act and shared them exclusively with the DCNF.
“These documents show an administration consumed by its campaign against what it termed ‘misinformation,’ potentially at the expense of other priorities, and intent on controlling what Americans could say,” said Protect the Public’s Trust Communications Director Alexa Moutevelis in a statement to the DCNF.
In the view of Murthy’s team, censoring social media was not a temporary emergency measure, the documents indicate. It was part and parcel of public health. The government censored memes, jokes and even factual information it did not like.
“The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects,” a Meta employee wrote on July 21, 2021, the congressional investigation showed.
The documents show the Biden administration had a “broad” vision for its new censorship tools.
“May be worth emphasizing that you don’t just see this as a COVID-related issue (i.e., it’s health and medical misinformation, not just COVID-related misinformation),” wrote Murthy’s policy adviser Daniel Tartakovsky in May 2021. “More broadly, it gets at the issue of how social media impacts people, especially young people.”
Tartakovsky did not respond to a request for comment.
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A memo to Murthy’s “misinformation tiger team” from the summer of 2021 shows the zeal with which Murthy’s office scrubbed the Internet of negative posts about COVID vaccines. They called it the “Nick Clegg approach” after Meta’s president of global affairs.
Evidence unearthed by the congressional investigation showed Clegg understood that the government’s requests violated the First Amendment. But Clegg said that Meta had “bigger fish we have to fry” with the government and that the company should consider “how we can be responsive to concerns.”
Murthy’s office expressed a sense of triumph at the temporary suspension of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as “momentum” towards booting more accounts, the memo shows.
Facebook and Amazon employees internally said the Biden administration was applying “pressure” to censor opinions the government did not like. The new documents show the government internally described it as “pressure” too.
Biden and Murthy had “put tech and stakeholders alike on notice that health misinformation was a significant public health issue,” the memo states.
Murthy’s office groused that it could not obtain more user data from Facebook.
“FB has insurmountable advantage on data, which means we’ll never know if they are on the level,” the memo states. It proposed “to hold FB and other tech providers accountable with push on more open data.”
Murthy’s office internally admitted in the memo that the misinformation crackdown “politicizes office by further engaging in social media/censorship war.”
Misinformation
While the surgeon general’s office has traditionally focused on providing good health information, Murthy’s office was for at least a two to four week period “unilaterally focused on misinformation” in the lead up to the July 2021 advisory, another email shows.
The documents show Murthy’s talking points that same summer for various media interviews and stakeholder meetings, and they include claims with a dearth of evidence.
“Simply put, vaccine requirements will stop the spread of variants and keep more people safe,” read Murthy’s prepared talking points in August 2021.
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His talking points state that “if you are unvaccinated, you present a problem to yourself, family, and those with whom you work.”
After the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted the COVID vaccine full approval in August 2021, aides told Murthy to avoid “providing minute details on the specifics of the FDA approval process.”
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Murthy’s talking points urged children to wear masks, even if states declined to implement mandates.
“Parents, have your kids wear masks,” the talking points read.
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Murthy’s talking points address the social media censorship. Talking points prepared for a “Stakeholder Q&A” stated that scrubbing the Internet of opinions disfavored by the government represented “the opposite” of cancel culture.
“Isn’t this just a part of cancel culture?” reads a question that Murthy prepared for under a headline reading “Tough Q&A.”
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“No, it’s the opposite actually,” Murthy’s prepared reply reads.
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