America's Thought Police: Rob Flaherty After serving on the failed presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Beto O'Rourke, Flaherty joined the Biden White House as Director of Digital Strategy in January 2021.
"Are you guys fucking serious?" Flaherty asked Facebook after the company failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine.
Flaherty later demanded to know how Facebook would address "Things that are dubious, but not provably false." In February 2021, he accused the company of fomenting "Political violence" by allowing "Vaccine skeptical" content on its platform.
"There's 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many?" Like Burleson's censorship of the mail, Flaherty's attack on the First Amendment was not directed at the speaker - the objective was to protect political power by denying citizens the right to access information.
Jenin Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, wrote in The Wall Street Journal: "These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies' failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives." Protecting the government-provided Covid narratives were Flaherty's primary focus.
Flaherty sought to control who could have a Facebook account, determine what they could post, and influence what they see.
In March 2023, Flaherty participated in an hour-long discussion at Georgetown University on his role in "How governments use social media to communicate with the public." An audience member asked Flaherty about his emails encouraging Facebook to censor private WhatsApp messages.
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