New documents reveal Facebook trained officials in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on how to censor American speech on “Covid & Vaccine Misinformation.”
According to records made public by the conservative nonprofit America First Legal (AFL), Facebook opened up an “end-to-end workflow” allowing federal bureaucrats to flag posts for censorship.
“The new portal dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring,” AFL reported. “Each censorship request automatically generated a ticket number so that the government could track if Facebook complied with its censorship demands.”
AFL exposed the records that detail the public-private censorship campaign with the litigation it brought against the CDC because of the agency’s First Amendment violations of free speech. According to slides from a May 19, 2021, onboarding presentation by Facebook for employees at the CDC, workers for the tech platform introduced officials to a “Government Reporting System.” In this system, “if the ‘Government requests,’ then ‘Facebook processes.’”
The system apparently worked by allowing CDC employees to sign up and access a portal where online posts could be flagged as misinformation. Only “government-issued or law enforcement email address[es]” were permitted to register. Government employees were then given confirmation notices with reference numbers when requests for suppression were received.
“Despite the many, many, examples of these ‘authorities’ later being proven wrong, all it took was a government determination by the Biden-Harris administration for Facebook to begin censoring the American people’s speech,” AFL reported.
Facebook’s policy was to censor statements that made “false claims about masks” (now shown to have been nearly useless), which discouraged “social distancing” (now known to have been fabricated by Dr. Anthony Fauci). If an individual was a “repeat offender” of the government’s ever-shifting determinations on “misinformation,” their account’s reach would be reduced or removed from their site altogether.
The documents reveal new details about Facebook’s direct collaboration with administration officials a month after the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted the arrangement was inappropriate.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee. “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.”
Facebook would not confirm that the portal with the CDC was shut down, but pointed The Federalist to Zuckerberg’s recent letter to lawmakers that the company “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today” and that “we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
“These documents show — definitively — the architecture behind the systems that political appointees and governmental bureaucrats used to unconstitutionally censor the free speech of Americans online,” said Gene Hamilton, the executive director of AFL in a Wednesday press release. “The right to speak — to even question authority — is so fundamental to our national identity, yet in the name of a public health crisis, Biden Administration officials worked with major companies to silence dissent.”
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