Government and Big Tech Collude On Covid-19 Misinformation Backchannels
286-Pages Of CDC/Big Tech Emails Show Government Shredding First Amendment Rights In Favor of Censoring Private Covid-19 Speech
Unless you’ve been de-platformed or shadow-banned from your favorite social media platform you might be skeptical that the US government would work directly with private big technology corporations to censor your speech, or any speech for that matter, that departs from the preferred narrative about Covid-19 in America.
Well if you are skeptical, buckle up.
Because, thanks to a recently released batch of emails. the debate on whether or not the Biden administration is in the free speech content moderation business can end.
Yes they did it. And continue to do it. And are ordering the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Google to do it as well.
The trove of Center of Disease Control and Prevention emails released on July 27 in response to a Freedom of Information request by America First Legal Foundation (AFL) reveals disturbing evidence of a chummy collision between government officials and employees of the nation’s largest technology platforms.
The 286-pages of emails and other documents show the American government is using private corporations to take down any content in which the CDC, White House, and other government agencies disagree with in the name of fighting “disinformation.”
White House Demands Big Tech Set Up Covid-19 Misinformation Channels
The documents show how the government set up regular chats with Twitter, Google, Facebook and other large technology companies to identify content deemed problematic and the efforts used to set up monitoring standards for additional social media content they viewed as “misinformation.”
AFL, who’s self described mission is to “fight back against lawless executive actions and the radical left, filled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Department of Health and Human Services,, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health.
It requested “all documents, records, and communications relating to the Biden Administration’s decision to direct big tech companies to censor speech on their platforms, abridging the First Amendment rights of the American people.”
The released documents reveal concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and promote Biden Administration propaganda.
The FOIA requests were filed after former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, on July 15, 2021, admitted during a press briefing that the Biden administration was actively working with Big Tech to censor American speech about vaccine hesitancy.
On that ominous day, Psaki casually remarked that the federal government was marshaling private resources to de-platform Americans, clearly violating the First Amendment.
The exact remarks that likely cost her job (after all Jen, the information release in the FOIA request, including a Orwellian presentation titled “Covid Misinformation: Hot Topics: May 28, 2021” is marked “not for further distribution…Please do not share outside your trust and safety teams.” ) and opened the FOIA floodgates were her stating that “we’re regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives, dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies.”
She also admitted that the White House was working with Facebook to flag “problematic posts” of Americans when she stated: “[i]n terms of actions . . . we've increased disinformation research and tracking. Within the Surgeon General's Office, we're flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
The White House as a social media content moderator.
Orwell would be so very proud.
The documents go as far show that Facebook specifically set up a specific “Covid-19 misinfo channel up for CDC and Census colleagues:”
The day after Psaki’s comments, the AFL legal team went into overdrive and filed the aforementioned stack of urgent FOIA requests.
“Jen Psaki has unwittingly confirmed a shocking truth: the White House is using massive Big Tech companies as a censorship arm of the federal government. If true, this means that Big Tech censorship is state censorship and thus facially unconstitutional. There is no dividing line between government and big tech — it is an incestuous union, and you cannot tell where one ends and one begins,” AFL President Stephen Miller remarked.
Emails Identify Key Big Tech Players, CDC Employees Involved In American Censorship Business
The trove of documents reveal several precise examples of collusion between big tech and CDC arbitrating what is acceptable and unacceptable to the 70% of the American population that shares information and opinions on social media platforms.
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest all were served FOIA requests for “any efforts to flag COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccine related ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’” by AFL.
Examples include:
CDC’s Scott Mullins acting as an editorial director for a private company by telling Google what information to publish on its platform:
Carol Crawford, Digital Media Branch at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emailing what she deems troubling posts and links to Politics & Government Outreach rep Genelle Quarles Adrien and Facebook Public Policy representative Iheme Payton:
Emails from Todd O’Boyle, Twitter’s Senior Manager of Public Policy were also shared where the platform is directly asking the CDC for examples of “problematic content” :
Crawford first reached out to Twitter March 18, 2021 to work with Twitter to “identity and monitor social media for vaccine misinformation .. to work with your trust team on a regular basis to discuss what we are seeing.”
Here is Carol Crawford’s email directly calling for soviet style censorship to be deployed on the more than 55 million US adults that discourse on Twitter :
CDC directly requested Big Tech to add “contextual information” to posts about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), where Americans can report problems with the vaccine.
The purpose of the “contextual information” is promote vaccine safety with a unified message … that a “report to VAERS does not mean the vaccine caused the event:”
The CDC telling Facebook how to draft Covid quiz questions on its platform is comedy gold. Once you read the 286-pages of emails, it’s clear the CDC is not very good at copywriting, or responding to emails in a timely manner:
And, just for fun, how about the CDC making sure the “disinfo” fight is put on pause for the new Juneteenth federal holiday:
Facebook Also Donated $15 Million In Add Credit to the CDC
And like any good partnership, how about sweetening the censorship party pot with a $15 million ad credit from Facebook to its friends at the CDC:
Fake News Champions
Fighting “fake news” has become a lucrative career and business model.
In reading the emails you’ll meet a number of truth con men and women building bankrolls by censoring what you say and think online.
You’ll meet Elisabeth Wilhelm, proud “vaccine confidence strategist” working for the CDC. Your faithful government servant trolling people to “apply for WHO's first comprehensive global training on tracking, analyzing and addressing misinformation that affects people's health behaviors and help health systems respond more effectively to COVID-19.”
You’ll meet Alexios Mantzarlis, policy and news and information credibility lead at Google who proudly announces he has “spent the better part of the past decade working on fact-checking and the challenge of online misinformation.”
Mantrazils is a prime example of the type of fact checking bureaucratic clown that has been birthed in the aftermath of post-pandemic blue check censorship race to the bottom.
Don’t worry, cool guys such as Mantzarlis – a former TED fellow (ironically a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas) who researched whether public plebeians can be “meaningfully included in decision-making about information quality on the major platforms” – will let you know what is appropriate for your consumption and what you will be allowed to discuss with your friends, coworkers, and high school buddies.
Clowns like these two are the new arbitrators of fact, reason, knowledge in this weird new world of lazy career bureaucrat and Shook Ones, Pt II big tech employees telling you how to look at and think about the world you live in.