Today, America First Legal released additional documents from its litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), exposing the complete onboarding documents Facebook used to train CDC employees on their government censorship portal to block free speech on “Covid & Vaccine Misinformation.”
Many Americans remember the unprecedented level of censorship by the Biden-Harris Administration in 2021. Unelected public health officials constantly revised their guidance, leading to repeating something that was “true” a week ago could suddenly get an account suspended. The Biden-Harris Administration’s clumsy and heavy-handed attempts to keep up with the rapidly evolving information environment entailed by a global pandemic gave all Americans a stark reminder of why the First Amendment was listed first.
These documents reveal how Facebook, on the heels of extreme pressure from the Biden-Harris White House (including from Rob Flaherty, a current senior Harris Campaign staffer) to remove specific posts, responded:
- Facebook created a new “end-to-end workflow” so that government officials could submit links for removal from Facebook;
- Facebook only gave access to the portal to approved government and law enforcement personnel;
- 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;
- By moving from email chains to a Facebook-hosted portal, the new system also made it harder for organizations like AFL to provide oversight to individual censorship requests;
- Each censorship request automatically generated a ticket number so that the government could track if Facebook complied with its censorship demands;
- The documents further show how Facebook explained precisely what content it would remove and what it needed from the CDC in order to censor certain narratives within the bounds of its “community standards.”
This release comes on the heels of recently released documents from that lawsuit, which exposed the United Kingdom’s influence on the Biden-Harris Administration’s censorship policy, and Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook only engaged in censorship after extreme pressure from the Biden-Harris White House.
The Intercept previously released excerpts from this slide deck, but AFL is now publishing the entire deck for the first time.
Part A: Censorship Made Easy
The documents expose an onboarding presentation given by Facebook employees to CDC staff on May 19, 2021. Facebook trained CDC staff on how to use the platform’s “Government Reporting System.” This came in response to profanity-laden demands from senior Biden–Harris White House officials exposed by the House Judiciary Committee. As their “End-to-end workflow” described, if “Government requests,” then “Facebook processes.”
These slides show how closely the Biden-Harris Administration’s CDC and Big Tech coordinated to censor speech they disagreed with. The onboarding included a “government user experience” demo. As part of the “End–to–end workflow,” Facebook streamlined the process to make it easy for the government to censor the American people.
Step 1 – Access to Account
First, Facebook granted “Access to CRS.” These slides showed CDC employees how to sign up, register, and login to the new portal.
Only “government-issued or law enforcement email address[es]” were allowed to use this system.
Step 2 – Submit Posts with Links
Prior to Facebook creating the portal, the CDC had been sending spreadsheets over email with links for Facebook to remove, but with this portal, post reporting would be standardized and fed into one system. Additionally, moving the censorship requests to a Facebook-hosted portal created a loophole in government recordkeeping requirements. Using this system permits government actors to evade federal law requiring meticulous keeping of federal records, thereby preventing the public from using existing tools like FOIA to see what the government is doing behind the scenes.
At this point, CDC employees could select their “Reason for reporting.” These included “COVID Misinformation,” “Vaccine Discouragement,” and “COVID Vaccine Misinformation.”
Facebook’s system allowed users from “authorized government agencies” to refer up to twenty links at a time for Facebook to remove across its platforms. Users could also submit additional comments.
Step 3 – Confirmation and Job Reference Number
The third step for the new portal was called “Final landing page: transparency,” where users would get a confirmation message, a ticket or reference number, and be able to access the “Help Center.”
The confirmation message read that “you should receive a response shortly,” which reaffirms the initial promise on the first slide: “Government requests … Facebook processes.”
Part B: Insights into Facebook’s Community Standards
The briefing also included a summary of Facebook’s “Community Standards.” They stated that they only removed information deemed “false” by “public health authorities.” 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.
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.
Facebook bragged that since the beginning of the Pandemic, which began only a year before the presentation, they had removed more than “16 million pieces of content.”
Remember — Facebook’s policy was only to remove posts if the government had declared something to be false.
The Constitution prohibits the government from censoring the American people, but Facebook and other social media companies went out of their way to make it easy for the Biden–Harris administration to “flag” posts for censoring. With a custom portal allowing the government to submit up to twenty links at a time, the Biden-Harris Administration and Facebook worked together to violate the First Amendment rights of countless Americans.
Statement from Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Executive Director:
“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. 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. The American people need to review these documents and understand just how far our leaders in Washington went to violate the First Amendment to our Constitution,” said Gene Hamilton.
See the full slide deck here.
