Immediately after taking office, the Biden administration pressured Amazon to not promote books that doubted the efficacy or safety of Covid-19 vaccines in early 2021.
The White House was concerned about books that contained “propaganda” or “misinformation,” according to Amazon company emails that were released by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government via subpoena.
On Monday, Jordan released ‘THE AMAZON FILES” on X/Twitter. They feature Andrew Slavic, the former Biden senior advisor for Covid-19, writing to the world’s largest seller of books that he found some of the books to be “concerning.”
“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?” wrote Slavitt to Amazon on March 2, 2021. Later in the same day, he pestered the company: “If you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up. I haven’t looked beyond that but if that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”
An Amazon thread of emails shows that the company would then covertly take action.
“We will not be doing a manual intervention today,” says one email between Amazon executives. “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.”
One Amazon official noted that another employee was given “very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.”
What Amazon did at the behest of the White House was to hide books, not promote books, and redirect customers to other books, or to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when they entered keywords in the search box.
Read THE AMAZON FILES at this link.
