EXCLUSIVE: COVID Was Just A Warm-Up For Biden’s ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’

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 documents draw 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.

Elon Musk’s collaboration with 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.

Many of the documents show Murthy’s office preparing to release a formal advisory on misinformation on July 14, 2021.