More Evidence Reveals CDC Colluded with Social Media Giants to Silence COVID ‘Misinformation’

Susan Berry, PhD

America First Legal (AFL) released a fourth set of documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that reveals more evidence of alleged collusion between the nation’s public health agency and social media companies to censor free speech and silence Americans under the government’s label of “misinformation.”

Last week, AFL’s 600-page document release uncovered evidence that Twitter operated a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other selective “stakeholders” that would allow them to delete or flag posts viewed as “misinformation,” noted AFL, which is led by former President Donald Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller.

Documents also showed, for example, Facebook touting its removal of over 16 million posts, with 2 million between February and May 19, 2021, that reflected COVID-19 views that dissented from the federal government’s narrative.

The documents were produced as Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) conducted a roundtable with prominent doctors and scientists who concluded federal health agencies willfully pushed COVID vaccines on Americans without an attempt to protect them from harm and death. Doctors called for an end to COVID vaccine mandates and the removal of COVID-19 vaccines from the market.

“In recent months, millions of Americans have witnessed the peeling of the ‘misinformation’ onion,” said Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel. “Beneath each layer of shocking details about a partnership between the federal government and Big Tech is yet another layer of connections, conspiracy, and collaboration between power centers that seek to suppress information from the American people.”

AFL observed the documents also demonstrate the federal government “was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ – or brainwashing – the public against anything that threatened its narrative,” explaining:

It did so by using aligned Big Tech corporations to monitor and manipulate users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. For example, Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it bragged about censoring more than sixteen million “pieces of content” containing opinions or information the U.S. government wanted suppressed.

Furthermore, the documents reveal CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF [United Nations Children’s Fund], WHO [World Health Organization] and IFCN [International Fact-Checking Network] member and leading civil society organization Mafindo,” a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner, to censor what it viewed as “disinformation.”

In one 2021 email exchange (page 404) uncovered by AFL, Irene Jay Liu, who heads Google’s News Lab for the Asia Pacific region, wrote to CDC Vaccine Confidence Strategist Elisabeth Wilhelm to invite her to speak at the APAC “Trusted Media Summit.”

Wilhelm responded, “Yes please! Thanks everyone! I feel like I got entry into the coolest misinformation fighting speakeasy. :D”

“She was then invited to the summit to give a keynote addressing how the CDC was working with WHO and other international organizations to address a so-called ‘infodemic’ and using ‘social inoculation’ to mitigate it. (pg. 425),” AFL noted.

In another example from May 2021, Twitter’s Todd O’Boyle recommended CDC’s Carol Crawford enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, noting it would be “the best way to get a spreadsheet like this reviewed.” (page 183)

O’Boyle also observed Carol’s prior tweets had either already been “actioned” and, if not, would be reviewed by “the team.”

Also included in this document release is a Facebook slide deck that “appears to show Facebook acting as an editor and content moderator, boasting its extensive censorship work to the CDC,” AFL states.

“We remove claims about the existence or severity of COVID-19 … includ[ing] claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous … than the common flu or cold,” Facebook touts on page 46.

On page 50, Facebook makes these “false claims about COVID Vaccines” using “incredibly vague and nebulous standards,” AFL asserts.

On page 51, Facebook lists as among its “Widely Debunked Vaccine Hoaxes,” that “Vaccines or their ingredients are deadly, toxic, poisonous, harmful, or dangerous;” that “Natural immunity is safer than vaccine acquired immunity;” and that “Vaccines are not effective to prevent the disease against which they purport to protect.”

Facebook included these items among its “hoaxes” even though, as AFL asserts, there existed “widespread knowledge at the time that the vaccines did not prevent transmission” and, as we now know, “more vaccinated people are dying now than unvaccinated.”

Hamilton said AFL is “proud to play a leading role in fighting for the rights of all Americans and revealing this vital information to the American people,” including in the protection of biological sex against the Biden administration and forcing the Biden education department to disband its Parents Council composed of leftist activists.

In July, AFL produced its first release of “smoking-gun documents” that Miller said “conclusively demonstrate that Big Tech has unlawfully colluded with the federal government to silence, censor, and suppress Americans’ free speech and violate their First Amendment rights.”

A second release of documents followed in September, and a third release in November.

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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Social Media” by Tracy Le Blanc. Background Photo “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” by Daniel Mayer. CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

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