Talk about hardball tactics. That, at least, is how Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, is characterizing how the Biden White House pressured the social media giant to remove Facebook posts that raised questions about vaccines during the Covid pandemic. The Biden officials would “scream” and “curse” at Meta staffers, Mr. Zuckerberg is disclosing. It’s no wonder a federal judge compared the Biden censorship regime to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” 

That was the government agency in the novel “1984” charged with “altering historical records and disseminating propaganda to manipulate and control public perception,” Judge Terry Doughty pointed out when he ruled against President Biden’s program to censor social media communications in the name of fighting “misinformation.” Judge Doughty called it “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments today, on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” open a window into how Mr. Biden’s minions pressured companies like Meta to stifle free speech deemed by the White House to be inconvenient. “Biden administration officials phoned executives at Meta,” the New York Post reports, yelling and cursing “at them while demanding that they remove Facebook posts casting doubt on the coronavirus vaccine.” 

While Mr. Zuckerberg and his company acquiesced at the time, the tech mogul is now griping that the Biden White House forced the company to delete information “that was honestly true.” This was “during the early days of the administration,” the Post adds, when Covid vaccines were just being rolled out. “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” is how Mr. Zuckerberg puts it.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s account helps flesh out the claims put forward in a landmark federal lawsuit by individuals who were censored by Mr. Biden’s “Ministry of Truth.” The plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri filed suit against Mr. Biden, arguing that his push to silence purported misinformation was designed “to induce” social media firms “to censor disfavored speech and speakers.” Judge Doughty was concerned that the censorship “targeted conservative speech.” 

It wasn’t, after all, just complaints about vaccines that ran afoul of the government censorship. Judge Doughty pointed to the ways social media firms clamped a lid on “the Hunter Biden laptop story,” say, or were “suppressing negative posts about the economy,” or “about President Biden.” Even the price of fast food burgers aroused the ire of the Biden “Ministry of Truth,” as these columns pointed out, when online gripes about inflation went viral.

Complaints that inflation was “out of control” under Mr. Biden sparked alarm in the White House, the Washington Post reported. Mr. Biden’s speech patrol decided that such speech was “one of many exaggerated examples of the nation’s economic woes,” the Post wrote. Administration officials sought to encourage “positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship,” the Post said, “while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments lay bare the pressure behind the Biden method of “working” with social media firms. When the riders of the Fifth Circuit weighed the claims in Murthy, they were alarmed by what looked like “federally coerced censorship.” Despite Mr. Biden’s claims to be benignly fact checking, the riders zeroed in on how quickly the companies leapt to comply with the government demands. 

The companies “responded with total compliance,” the riders said in their ruling in the case. “Facebook asked what it could do to ‘get back to a good place’ with the White House.” YouTube and Google  vowed “to do better.” It was a reminder, if one is needed, that individuals and companies do not negotiate with the federal leviathan on a level field. Mr. Biden’s “unrelenting pressure,” the riders said, led the firms to “bend to the government’s will.”

Yet the Supreme Court sided with Mr. Biden in Murthy, saying the plaintiffs failed to show harm from the censorship. Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments — on Mr. Rogan’s podcast, not Facebook — put that decision in a harsher light. Even if the Meta chief is trying, along with ending fact checking and DEI programs, to curry favor with the new president after tilting to the left in recent years, his disclosures of government censorship are no less chilling.