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. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
