Facebook trained government officials to censor Americans, according to documents released by America First Legal (AFL). The training occurred through an online portal for reporting “misinformation” relating to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook created an “end-to-end workflow” for government employees to submit links for content removal. This portal “dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring,” AFL said in a press release.
The censorship requests generated a ticket number, allowing the government to track if Facebook complied with the removal request.
Prior to the creation of the portal, the CDC sent Facebook spreadsheets with content to remove. After the portal was implemented, the government could skirt recordkeeping requirements, evading federal.
The system allowed those from “authorized government agencies” to file up to 20 links at a time to be removed from Facebook for reasons such as “COVID Misinformation,” “Vaccine Discouragement,” and “COVID Vaccine Misinformation.”
Social media pages and profiles that repeatedly posted content in violation of Facebook’s standards faced “restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or removal from our site,” the documents say.
More than “16 million pieces of content” had been removed from Facebook when the documents were created.
The documents reveal the close partnership between the Biden-Harris administration’s CDC and Big Tech, AFL explained.
AFL Executive Director Gene Hamilton said the documents show 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,” he explained. “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.”