Newly released documents from America First Legal (AFL) provide new details on how Facebook trained government employees with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to use the social media platform’s censorship portal to target so-called ” COVID & Vaccine Misinformation.” The legal group engaged in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation against the CDC published the Facebook onboarding documents on its website on Wednesday.
Following constant pressure from the Biden-Harris government—including current Kamala Harris presidential campaign senior staffer Rob Flaherty—Facebook created an “end-to-end workflow” portal for government officials to submit links for the social media platform to remove. The links in question were posted by Americans on the Facebook platform.
According to AFL, this process “dramatically increased the efficiency of the censorship machine by allowing up to twenty links at a time to be referred for censoring.” Allegedly, only approved government officials and law enforcement had access to the portal, though there are significant concerns that some may have shared access with non-authorized users.
Among the other revelations in the FOIA’ed documents are that “[e]ach censorship request automatically generated a ticket number so that the government could track if Facebook complied with its censorship demands.” Additionally, the trove of communications acquired by AFL shows that “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.'”
The social media company, co-founded by tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, walked government employees through a series of slides that provided an almost paint-by-numbers explanation of how to report content to be censored. In August, The National Pulse reported that Zuckerberg admitted Facebook interfered in the 2020 presidential election and censored Americans at the behest of the Biden-Harris government.
