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June 30, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign lobbied Facebook to restrict speech from the campaign of former President Donald Trump, according to emails obtained by Biden ally CNN.

At issue was a Team Trump video from last September in which presidential son Donald Trump Jr. accused Democrats of planning to use “millions of fraudulent ballots” to win, and called on “every able-bodied man, woman to join the Army for Trump’s election security operation.”

On September 22, the Biden campaign complained to Facebook that the video “is still on your platform” when “it is impossible to reconcile this with any of the policies regarding voting and voter suppression that Facebook has released over the past three years and emphasized to us privately in several dozen conversations,” CNN reported. “The social network initially concluded that the video did not violate its policies, which the Biden campaign declared “lacking.”

“I struggle to believe that is the precedent you are intending to set (…) if the effort and mental gymnastics undertaken to allow this post to remain on your platform were instead devoted to carrying out your acknowledged responsibility to democracy, we might see some progress,” a Biden campaign official wrote.

While Facebook did not censor the video, CNN noted that it (as well as Twitter) eventually “affixed labels to the videos pointing to accurate information about voting,” and “brought in a new policy against militarized language and polling locations.”

While CNN sympathetically frames the Biden team’s actions as good-faith opposition to “misinformation” and “violent rhetoric,” Breitbart senior technology correspondent Allum Bokhari called the story “obvious kowtowing to Democrat pressure,” which “is apparently not enough for party activists, one of whom is quoted by CNN as calling Facebook — which has banned President Trump, potentially permanently, as well as numerous other high-profile conservatives — a ‘right-wing propaganda machine.’”

Facebook apparently restricting one political campaign’s content at the behest of the opposing campaign further calls into question social media companies’ claims to merely be private entities concerned with fostering “healthy conversations.” That narrative took multiple hits recently, between the Texas Supreme Court ruling that Facebook may be held liable for allowing sex trafficking to be facilitated on its platform, and a Center for American Liberty lawsuit accusing Twitter of colluding with the California government to silence conservatives.