Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on censorship: what the evidence says · JRE #2461
SUBJECT: CENSORSHIP
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
The Whitehouse ordered me to be removed from Instagram. I lost a million followers. Insane. 37 hours after he got After he took the oath of office, swearing to up to hold the Constitution, they were ordering Mark Zuckerberg to take me down.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Meta (Instagram's parent company) disabled Kennedy's personal Instagram account on February 10, 2021, roughly three weeks after Biden's January 20, 2021 inauguration, not 37 hours as Kennedy claimed; a Meta spokesperson said the account was removed for "repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines." PolitiFact, examining Kennedy's related "37 hours" censorship claim, found a documented instance of a White House official emailing Twitter (not Meta) on January 23, 2021, asking to have a different Kennedy post removed "ASAP"; that post was never taken down and stayed live, and no public record of a comparable White House communication to Meta specifically ordering the Instagram removal has surfaced. Kennedy's account had about 770,000 followers when it was reinstated in June 2023, a figure that does not match the "million followers" he says he lost in the removal. PolitiFact rated Kennedy's broader claim that Biden used federal power to censor a political opponent as False, noting Kennedy was not yet a declared political rival when the 2021 events occurred. The core fact that Instagram removed Kennedy's account in 2021 for COVID/vaccine misinformation is well established, but the specific causal claim of a direct White House order to Meta on a 37-hour timeline is not supported by the public record.