Alex Berenson to amend suit against Biden, Pfizer after Zuckerberg admitted government pushed censorship
Journalist Alex Berenson said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s admission that his company, Facebook, was pressured by the Biden-Harris administration to censor Americans, particularly regarding COVID-19 content, will affect his legal battle with President Biden.
Berenson has long alleged that members of the White House and Pfizer executives colluded to silence his COVID vaccine skepticism, and is suing Biden, White House officials and Pfizer honchos accusing them of violating First Amendment rights by pushing for his removal from Twitter after he raised concerns about the shots.
Zuckerberg made the stunning admission in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, more than a year after providing the committee with thousands of documents as part of its investigation into content moderation on online platforms.
"If you look at the work of Jim Jordan's committee, you can see the pressure. It was not one phone call or one email. There was significant pressure put on Facebook and Twitter, and to a lesser extent Amazon and YouTube, for months and months by the Biden administration," Berenson told Fox News Digital.
META CEO ADMITS BIDEN-HARRIS ADMIN PRESSURED COMPANY TO CENSOR AMERICANS
Berenson said it’s "nice" to see Zuckerberg admit it.
"It’s significant for my lawsuit, there is no question about that. We are going to quote that letter, as we amend Berenson v. Biden, which we’re doing," he said.
The former New York Times reporter said the amended lawsuit is coming "very soon," and will include information that will shock Americans. Berenson said he has new information about what led to him being banned from Twitter in 2021 at the height of the vaccine debate, before Elon Musk bought it and rebranded the company as X.
Twitter restored his account in July 2022 after he took legal action. The company settled and even admitted Berenson’s "tweets should not have led to suspension."
"I was banned and my account was wiped out, which is a profound form of censorship in my book," Berenson said.
"We now have new information about exactly how that happened and exactly what senior executives at Twitter thought about it," he continued. "Anyone who is looking at it fairly, it’s going to be stunning. It’s going to be disturbing."
Berenson’s suit named Biden, White House advisers Andrew Slavitt and Robert Flaherty, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, Pfizer board member and ex-Trump FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as defendants.
Berenson said it will be clear that government officials and senior Pfizer executives worked together to censor his skepticism.
"I don’t think anybody’s going to be able to look at it and not see that," he said.
Berenson believes Musk’s staunch belief in free speech made X the most "important place to get news" in America and influenced Zuckerberg to come clean.
"Should American voters trust Facebook? I think you can trust it more today than yesterday," Berenson said.
"I think Elon has pushed Zuckerberg to define himself better on this, you know, and arguably that is almost as important as anything Elon has done on X itself, because Facebook is a bigger platform," he added. "To have Zuckerberg saying, ‘We care about free speech, and we don’t like this kind of pressure,’ I think is a really important step and I do think Musk deserves some credit for that."
In Monday’s letter, Zuckerberg also wrote about throttling the Hunter Biden laptop story. He wrote that the FBI warned his company about "a potential Russian disinformation operation" regarding the Biden family and Burisma, leading up to the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg said the infamous New York Post story that was published days before the 2020 election reported on corruption allegations involving Biden’s family, so they had fact-checkers review the story and temporarily demote it while waiting for a reply.
"It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story," Zuckerberg wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Berenson's lawsuit.
Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment.
Berenson also feels there is a clear "double standard," because the mainstream media would be "down Trump’s throat and talking about how he doesn’t care about the Constitution and the First Amendment" if he was in Biden’s shoes.
"Because it’s the Biden administration, they get a pass," Berenson said.
"The Biden administration gets exempt from its censorship," he continued. "And partly that's because the media was encouraging vaccine censorship, and the media wanted Biden to win in 2020 and went with this completely ludicrous story that this laptop had somehow been planted in some repair store in Delaware by Russian agents. It never made any sense."
A White House spokesperson previously told Fox News, "When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."
Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner contributed to this report.