FULL TITLE:
EXPLOSIVE CENSORSHIP DOCUMENTS – America First Legal Releases Complete Internal Facebook Onboarding Documents Used to Train CDC Employees on How to Censor the American Public
WASHINGTON, D.C. – 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.