White House officials pressured Amazon in 2021 to censor and minimize access to books on its online site that questioned the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to e-mails released earlier this month by House Judiciary Committee Chairman, U.S. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.
The campaign to curtail any vaccine-related book sales during the height of the pandemic was led by President Biden’s Senior Advisor for Covid-19 Response, Andrew Slavitt, and sought to avoid the spread of “propaganda and misinformation.”
“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?” Slavitt wrote to Amazon in a Mar. 2, 2021, e-mail.
In initial discussions, Amazon officials discouraged “a manual intervention” to censor or remove certain book titles from populating in search results, concerned that it would be too obvious and lead to further criticism. “We will not be doing a manual intervention today,” one e-mail between Amazon executives read. “The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”
The Amazon officials, whose names were redacted from the e-mails, reveal that another individual at the company “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.”
Hellbound and Down 