By James Titcomb

As the Delta variant spread across the US in July 2021, Clarke Humphrey, an official at the White House’s Covid-19 response team, emailed two Facebook executives asking them to take down an Instagram account impersonating Anthony Fauci.

“Hi there – any way we can get this pulled down? It is not actually one of ours,” Humphrey wrote. Less than a minute later, Facebook responded: “Yep, on it!”

The account imitating the then chief medical adviser was duly deleted – far quicker than if it had been reported through Instagram’s standard channels.

The emails are among those in a cache of more than 15,000 gathered by state prosecutors in a lawsuit against the US officials including Joe Biden, seeking to shut down contact between the White House and social media giants.

Last year, Louisiana and Missouri’s attorneys general, alongside a number of prominent anti-vaccine campaigners, sued the White House, seeking a ruling that the communication violated US free speech laws.

On Tuesday – the Independence Day timing may or may not have been a coincidence – a judge appointed by Donald Trump issued a stunning injunction forbidding a lengthy list of White House officials from making contact with social media companies to report misinformation.

The order bars individuals including Xavier Becerra, the US health secretary, Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, and Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, among dozens more officials, from “urging, encouraging , pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms”.

In a 155-page ruling, the judge, Terry Doughty, said the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” and compared the administration’s actions to the “Ministry of Truth”, the repressive censorship authority in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Biden administration is likely to appeal the injunction – which is not final – and said it did not order posts to be taken down. However, it is a major victory for campaigners who have argued that democratic governments overstepped their power during the pandemic, including restrictions on free speech.

The trove of emails, obtained through legal requests, contain no single smoking gun. Instead they illustrate ongoing pressure from officials at various US government agencies to pressure YouTube, Twitter, and – in particular – Facebook parent Meta to act faster and more aggressively on anti-vaccine posts, conspiracy theories and the lab-leak theory.

Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and Meta’s president of global affairs, was intimately involved in the White House discussions, sending regular reports on how the company was tackling misinformation and pushing back on public pronouncements from officials criticising Meta.

In one phone call between Murthy and Sir Nick, the surgeon general asked Meta to do more to tackle misinformation. In another email in 2021, Andy Slavitt, the White House’s senior Covid-19 adviser, emailed Sir Nick complaining about a post from the Fox News host Tucker Carlson expressing scepticism about vaccines.

“Number one on Facebook. Sigh,” Slavitt wrote, according to legal documents. Sir Nick responded saying the post did not break Facebook’s rules, but was being demoted so that fewer people would see it in news feeds. Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy, responded saying: “There’s 40,000 shares on the video. . . . How effective is that?”

He added: “Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” referring to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In other emails, Sir Nick apologised for not responding to posts that broke Facebook’s rules more quickly, the documents say.

After Biden made an offhand remark accusing Facebook of “killing people” by allowing posts criticising the vaccine, Sir Nick texted Murthy, the surgeon general. “It’s not great to be accused of killing people,” he wrote. Nonetheless, at a subsequent meeting, Facebook agreed to “do more” to tackle Covid misinformation.

Despite the occasional resistance from Facebook, emails published as part of the lawsuit often showed White House officials berating social media companies, who were deferential in response. “We think there is considerably more we can do in ‘partnership’ with you and your team to drive behaviour,” one executive wrote.

Officials were also active in encouraging Twitter and YouTube to remove content, according to the order. In the early weeks of the administration, Flaherty emailed Twitter asking them to remove a parody account linked to Biden’s granddaughter, writing: “Please remove this account immediately.” It was gone 45 minutes later.

Humphrey asked the company to remove an anti-vaccine tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Later that year, Christian Tom, a deputy director of digital strategy, asked Twitter to remove a digitally altered video of Jill Biden that made it appear as if the First Lady was swearing at children. Twitter initially said it did not violate its policies, but later removed the clip.

YouTube, meanwhile, was asked why it was “funnelling people into hesitancy” over the vaccine. The companies did not comment.

The White House denied that it had forced social media companies to take material offline.

“Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present,” it said.

But as the lawsuit argues, the conversations were not taking place in a vacuum. They came as debates raged across Congress about whether to remove “Section 230” protections enjoyed by social media companies that limit responsibility for what their users post, and as the US government pursued lawsuits against Facebook and Google seeking to break the companies up.

Whatever the case’s ultimate outcome, its plaintiffs may believe they have already been successful. A “Disinformation Governance Board” set up last April, which prompted the lawsuit, was disbanded in August.

After reporting by The Telegraph, the UK Government is under pressure to shut down its own Counter Disinformation Unit, which passed information to social media companies to encourage them to take down posts. And Elon Musk, a champion of conservative voices, now owns Twitter.

In his conclusion, the judge quoted the late Democrat president Harry Truman: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one place to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”