AFL exposes internal Facebook documents used for training CDC employees on censoring the public
By bellecarter // 2024-09-29
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American conservative organization America First Legal (AFL) recently revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used Facebook onboarding documents to train CDC employees on how to "censor Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) and vaccine "misinformation." "These documents show the architecture behind the systems that political appointees and governmental bureaucrats used to unconstitutionally censor the free speech of Americans online," AFL Director Gene Hamilton said in a statement. "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." According to Hamilton, the people need to review these documents and understand just how far leaders in Washington went to violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. Facebook trained CDC staff on how to use the platform's "Government Reporting System." As per the litigation, Facebook created a new "end-to-end workflow," which is a streamlined process to make it easy for the government to censor the American people. The social media platform only gave access to approved government and law enforcement personnel. They were assigned to submit links for removal from Facebook. The said portal "dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine" by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring. Each censorship request automatically generated a ticket number so that the government could track if Facebook complied with its censorship demands. The newly revealed documents further show how Facebook explained precisely what content it would remove and what it needed from the CDC to censor certain narratives within the bounds of its "community standards." According to the workers, they only removed information deemed "false by public health authorities" despite the many examples of these authorities later being proven wrong. Facebook's policy was to censor statements that made 'false' claims about masks (now shown to have been nearly useless, making those statements true), which discouraged social distancing (now known to have been fabricated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House chief medical advisor). 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. AFL also pointed out that the lawsuit exposed the United Kingdom's influence on the Biden-Harris administration's censorship policy and Meta (Facebook's parent company) CEO Mark Zuckerberg's admission that Facebook only engaged in censorship after extreme pressure from the current U.S. regime. (Related: Zuckerberg admits Biden admin pressured Meta to CENSOR content.)

Zuckerberg regretted caving into Biden-Harris admin pressure to censor content

Back in August, Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that he regretted colluding with the federal government when he faced significant pressure to censor content on Facebook and Instagram. In a letter to the committee's Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), he said: "I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. We're ready to push back if something like this happens again." The letter refers specifically to the widespread suppression of contrarian viewpoints relating to COVID-19. Federal bureaucrats pushed social media platforms to take down content that could make people hesitate to submit to the vaccine mandate. President Joe Biden accused Zuckerberg and his moderators of "killing people" if they failed to moderate vaccine-skeptical content more aggressively. "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," wrote Zuckerberg. It was revealed that Zuckerberg's people and CDC officials exchanged emails where it was disclosed that the government took a heavy hand in suppressing content. The CDC also took the position that expressing skepticism about vaccinating children was a form of misinformation and should be policed, reports indicated. Zuckerberg also exposed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned him about Russian attempts to sow chaos on social media by releasing a fake story about the Biden family just before the 2020 election. This warning motivated Facebook to take action against the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story when it was published in October 2020, which of course turned out to be true as well. "We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again," Zuckerberg further vowed. Head over to Censorship.news to read stories related to the government's efforts to suppress free speech.

Sources for this article include:

AFLegal.org 1 AFLegal.org 2 Reason.com
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