Confirming that the federal government is using leftist social media to censor Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ran a major program to coordinate with Big Tech on stopping China Virus “vaccine misinformation” on Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
The possibly illegal censorship campaign lasted six months in 2020.
CDC personnel enthusiastically contacted personnel at the social media giants after flagging supposedly inaccurate information.
The result: A federal agency not only trampled on the First Amendment right of Americans to speak freely, but also squelched accurate information.
Emails Revealed
The revelations are in emails that America First Legal squeezed out of the federal government and provided to the Washington Free Beacon.
CDC “coordinated with social media companies and Google to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a trove of internal communications,” the website reported:
Over the course of at least six months, starting in December 2020, CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over “vaccine misinformation.” At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as “example posts.”
In one email to a CDC staffer, a Twitter employee said he is “looking forward to setting up regular chats” with the agency. Other emails show the scheduling of meetings with the CDC over how to best police alleged misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
The overwrought concern about “misinformation” ended in “mistaken acts of censorship,” the Free Beacon continued, and knocked out “valid public health messaging.”
But beyond that practical problem is the legal question of whether the federal government can lawfully coordinate a censorship campaign with leftist torpedoes in Big Tech. That aside, the CDC’s move walks hand-in-hand with the Biden administration’s attempt to create a “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Homeland Security.
At the height of that dubious and dangerous effort, the website “reported that the now-shuttered disinformation board arranged a meeting with a Twitter executive who blocked users from sharing stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
In other words, Biden’s button men coordinated with leftists inside Twitter to protect his son, a sex fiend and drug addict.
Other Federal Agencies
Worse still, “the CDC’s effort to police alleged disinformation expanded to other federal agencies as well. An internal March 2021 email from a senior CDC staffer states ‘we are working on [sic] project with Census to leverage their infrastructure to identify and monitor social media for vaccine misinformation.’”
And another “email shows a senior CDC official appeared at Google’s 2020 ‘Trusted Media Summit.’ The conference, according to its website, was ‘for journalists, fact-checkers, educators, researchers and others who work in the area of fact-checking, verification, media literacy, and otherwise fighting misinformation,’” the Free Beacon reported:
One of the organizers of the conference asked the senior CDC official for permission to post her remarks on YouTube. That official declined, saying she was not authorized to speak publicly.
In the same email chain with a senior CDC official, a Google staffer offers to promote an initiative from the World Health Organization about “addressing the COVID-19 infodemic and strengthen community resilience against misinformation.” That same Google staffer offers to introduce the CDC official to a Google colleague who is “working on programs to counter immunization misinfo.”
Facebook also awarded the CDC with $15 million in ad credits for the company’s platforms in April 2021, according to several emails.
“This gift will be used by CDC’s COVID-19 response to support the agency’s messages on Facebook, and extend the reach of COVID-19-related Facebook content, including messages on vaccines, social distancing, travel, and other priority communication messages,” an internal CDC memo reads.
Paul Censored
The secret pact might explain why YouTube temporarily shut down Senator Rand Paul’s feed after he said that cloth and other masks available to the public will not stop the transmission of the China Virus.
As The New American reported last year, the video streaming service, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, suspended Paul for seven days because he cited two peer-reviewed studies that said masks are useless against the Asiatic microbe.
Anthony Fauci, the man who’s been running the government’s China Virus response, admitted that masks don’t work, but that didn’t stop YouTube. Another prominent physician, Michael Osterholm, said the same thing on CNN. But only Paul was censored.
“Over the last year, Congressional Dems — at least 3 times — have summoned the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter and *explicitly threatened that they’d be punished with laws and regulations if they don’t censor more,” contrarian columnist Glenn Greenwald tweeted. “That makes it quasi-state action.”
And indeed, that is what the CDC’s partnership with Google, Facebook, and Twitter shows.
