It has been known for some time now that Facebook and other social media platforms worked with the government to censor and suppress American discourse. However, it bears repeating that the Biden-Harris Administration has been particularly committed to censoring information that departs from the government's narrative. America First Legal's (AFL) lawsuit against the CDC further substantiates that the Biden-Harris administration made it easy to efficiently mass report and censor social media content using a Facebook portal dedicated to the CDC.
Most notably, the creation of the portal allowed the government to "evade federal law requiring meticulous keeping of federal records." The dedicated portal effectively prevented public use of FOIA and other tools that would have allowed access to documentation of censorship activity the government was trying to hide. The public-private, big government/Big Tech partnership is yet another example of the ways the government launders its activity and seeks to evade accountability to American taxpayers.
According to AFL, the portal "dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring." The
AFL asserts the Biden Administration and Facebook used the portal to coordinate efforts and to "streamline" the process for censoring Americans' online speech on subjects related to COVID and the pandemic. Before Facebook created the portal, the CDC was reduced to a clumsier, more manual process of sending emails "with links for Facebook to remove" content the administration didn't like. On the other hand, the portal helped "standardize" the reporting of the offending posts by feeding the potentially damaging speech (damaging from the government's point of view) into one system that featured an ability to label and tag content. The portal also featured a ticketing system to ensure that CDC users could track the efficiency of Facebook's processing of requests. Users were given a reference number and a confirmation email to help track their requests for the removal of content.
Officials in the Biden Administration repeatedly told the American public that information would be removed only when the information was deemed to be false by "public health authorities" or was likely "to contribute to imminent physical harm." According to their ever-elusive standards, the government and CDC removed content that threatened to "increase the likelihood of exposure to or transmission of the virus, or having adverse effects on the public health system's ability to cope with the pandemic." It turns out that much of the content the government sought to censor was not only constitutionally protected speech but was, in many cases, information that might have saved countless lives.
The same government officials repeatedly denied they were censoring opinions or restricting the public's ability to "discuss, debate and share their personal experiences, opinions and news related to the COVID-19 pandemic." Unfortunately, hundreds of medical professionals and social media users would most certainly disagree with that stance. There are countless examples of posts from doctors and Americans referencing masks, vaccines, treatments, and mandates that were removed from online platforms only because they didn't comport with the government's narrative. Americans were expected not to believe their own lying eyes. According to the AFL lawsuit, Facebook admitted having removed "more than '16 million pieces of content'" for violating its COVID-19 and vaccine policies.
The slide deck openly touts Facebook's unabashed position on the efficacy of vaccines. One slide detail shows Facebook aimed to "[bring] 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations" and to "[o]vercoming global challenges in vaccination." Much of the content Facebook was "policing" refuted the typical COVID talking points dispersed by the government—from transmission to immunity to even treatment protocols. Nearly all of the official government narratives have proven over time to be false. In its alleged quest to stop "misinformation," Facebook and the government were actually the promulgators of it.
Facebook also included in the slide deck content that attempted to "debunk vaccine hoaxes." Ironically, these so-called conspiratorial vaccine hoaxes are themselves now being debunked as more data is allowed to see the light of day. Laughably, Facebook asserted in its list of hoaxes the idea that natural immunity was less safe than "vaccine-acquired immunity." It may have been the only time in history that the fact of natural immunity was denied.
