In case you thought 2021 was just about ever-shifting “expert advice,” think again. Thanks to America First Legal, we now know that behind the chaotic public health messaging, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Facebook were playing a little game of “whack-a-mole” with your freedom of speech.
Today, new onboarding documents were unearthed, which shows just how cozy Facebook got with the CDC. The social media giant wasn’t merely policing what it thought was “misinformation” on COVID and vaccines; it was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative. The Biden-Harris Administration, while trumpeting their “fight for truth,” had essentially deputized Facebook to clean up the messy world of online discourse. And who decides what’s messy? Apparently, anyone with a .gov email address.
Let’s rewind to 2021, the peak of the pandemic drama. The public was dealing with a mutating narrative on what constituted “the truth.”
In other words, what was factual one week might be misinformation the next, depending on who you asked—or more accurately, who was in power.
At the time, the administration faced heavy criticism for overseeing a clampdown on dissent. Social media platforms, like Facebook, took on the noble mantle of censoring anything that didn’t align with the latest CDC talking points.
One day it was, “Don’t wear masks,” and the next, “You must wear two.” If you were quick enough to quote the CDC’s latest declaration, congratulations, you won a reprieve from the online guillotine. But heaven forbid you posted a month-old statement—down came the banhammer.
The First Amendment? Ah yes, that pesky little thing. It felt like an afterthought in the administration’s relentless quest to manage the pandemic, or rather, manage the narrative about the pandemic.