Documents Uncover Secret Twitter Portal US Government Used to Censor COVID-19 Content

Elon Musk calls it ‘extremely concerning’

By Patricia Tolson, EPOCH TIMES December 15, 2022

New documents reveal how the United States government used a secret Twitter portal to censor COVID-19 content that contradicted the government’s narrative.

In its ongoing probe into Twitter’s censorship practices, America First Legal has obtained a fourth set of documents (pdf) exposing a secret Twitter portal, which U.S. government officials used to censor dissenting COVID-19 views in violation of the First Amendment. It’s a revelation Elon Musk described as “extremely concerning.”

The documents reveal that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was collaborating with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Mafindo to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia that is funded by Google, known to have censored searches for keywords like Coronavirus, and COVID-19 as well as blocking information regarding adverse reactions and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Facebook started its third-party fact-checking program in 2016, working with fact-checkers from around the world who are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter to rate and review the accuracy of the content on their platform. According to the IFCN website, they believe “nonpartisan and transparent fact-checking can be a powerful instrument of accountability journalism.” However, among their advisory board, U.S.-based representatives appear to be from liberal-leaning outlets such as the Washington Post and PolitiFact, which is owned by Poynter.

The Twitter Portal

On March 10, 2021 email from a US Public Policy employee at Facebook to several CDC employees spoke of the social media giant’s “weekly sync with CDC” and how the CDC was “to invite other agencies as needed.”

A March 24, 2021 email from the same Facebook employees to CDC employees said “this is my regular FB meeting and they would like to discuss 2 misinformation topics” and “misinformation that was removed.”

On May 10, 2021, a Twitter employee recommended to a CDC official to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, which he described as “the best way to get a spreadsheet like this reviewed.”

On May 11, 2021, the CDC official enrolled her personal Twitter account into Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, which allowed “a special, expedited reporting flow in the Twitter Help Center.”

A May 19, 2021 Facebook Community Standards manual reveals how the company works with lawmakers and legal council as well as human rights activists in developing policies in their goals of “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” while “combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation” and “overcoming global challenges in vaccination.” Methods used to accomplish this included removing “false information that has been debunked by public health experts” and rejecting ads that violate their policies, “including those that discourage vaccination.” They also reduced the distribution of “misleading claims rated by independent fact-checkers.”

Removed Content

Posts that Facebook would delete—which the CDC or any other public health authority deemed as “false and likely to contribute to imminent violence of physical harm”—included:

  • Claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the common flu or cold.
  • Claims that COVID-19 cannot be transmitted in certain climates, weather conditions, or locations.
  • Claims that for the average person, something can guarantee prevention from getting COVID-19 or can guarantee recovery from COVID-19 before such a cure or prevention has been approved.
  • Claims that COVID-19 tests cause cancer.
  • Claims about the availability or existence of COVID-19 vaccines.
  • Claims about the safety or serious side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
  • Claims about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
  • Claims about how the COVID-19 vaccine was developed or its ingredients.
  • Claims involving conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines or vaccine programs.

Content deemed to have been “debunked” included among other things, “vaccines cause the disease against which they meant to protect, or cause the person to be more likely to get the disease,” that “natural immunity is safer than vaccine acquired immunity,” and  “vaccines are not effective to prevent the disease against what they purport to protect.”

Repeat offenders would face restrictions “including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations” or removal from the site.

These punishments were conducted despite evidence that the vaccines do not prevent transmission, that vaccines cause adverse effects and even death, and that more vaccinated people are now dying than unvaccinated. Even the CDC admitted in June that vaccinated people could contract the disease again.

The Coolest Misinformation Fighting Speakeasy’

In August 2021, the head of Google’s News Lab for the Asia Pacific region (APAC), emailed a CDC Vaccine Confidence Strategist to invite her to the APAC’s “Trusted Media Summit.” The CDC’s vaccine confidence strategist then emailed the event planner for Google’s APAC Trusted Media Summit, noting her excitement over being invited to what she referred to as “the coolest misinformation fighting speakeasy.”

The same CDC employee 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.

An Oct. 28 email from a CDC to the Twitter team was regarding preliminary discussions on the CDC plans for communicating guidance regarding “pediatric vaccines.”

A Nov. 2, 2021 email from a Facebook employee to multiple CDC employees was related to “vaccine misinformation” relative to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). The Facebook employee informed the CDC employees that they had “launched a new feature in Instagram, where accounts that repeatedly post content that violates our policies on COVID-19 or vaccine misinformation may now lose the ability to be tagged or mentioned or may see pop-ups asking if they’d like to delete certain posts that may violate our policies.”

Finally, Facebook boasts of removing over 16 million posts on Facebook and Instagram, including over 2 million between February and May 2021.

AFL’s first release of documents revealed the explicit collusion between the CDC and Big Tech to censor what the Biden administration deemed “misinformation” and push covert COVID-19 propaganda. AFL’s second release built the evidentiary record showing that CDC specifically sent Facebook and Twitter-specific posts to take down, throttle, censor, or flag. AFL’s third release revealed that the CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were driven by political polling by liberal dark money group The Kaiser Family Foundation.

December 17, 2022 | 5 Comments »

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5 Comments / 5 Comments

  1. @Felix

    Really is that really your position that this virus is all a scam?

    If you read my words carefully, you will see that I did not suggest the virus is a scam, the pandemic, however, is. Anyone suggesting that this virus is not a virus is simply wrong, but it has not kept people such as Dr. Lee Merritt from making such claims even to this day.

    As a respiratory illness, Covid requires treatment, and in the absence of such required treatment it became a very real threat affecting millions. The effect of the virus is, however, only so overwhelming as you and I have seen it become due to the fact that those who have been exposed and sickened by it were asked to sit at home and become too ill to easily treat with any success. Indeed, people were kept at home to worsen for two weeks while they were literally turning blue in the face and required hospitalization and care. This brought the numbers of people requiring hospitalization in a given locality to be quite unmanageable. All the shelter in place nonsense, staying inside where the virus was able to concentrate and better infect everyone in the house, complicated the matter even further.

    These are the reasons why the hospitals which became overwhelmed were overwhelmed, not because of the inherent lethality of the virus itself, but because of the gross malfeasance in treating this respiratory virus it as if it caused a respirator illness which did not require early and immediate treatment. Drugs which can treat it without causing further concerns, ie they are safe, such as IVM and HCQ (not alone but in a cocktail as all viral infections require), have been stated to be lethal by people who know this is false. These life saving drugs which have been dosed to billions of people over decades have also come to be described as being only veterinary drugs. These drugs were pulled from the market in many areas and its ability to be prescribed, even for non-Covid uses, remains to be a focus of the govts around the world. They manipulate the doctors from prescribing it, they manipulate the pharmacists from dispersing it, and the manipulate the public from demanding it. Of course, the truth is that Covid has been shown to be treatable using many other drugs, but the use of IVM and HCQ are preferred due to their record of safe application and near zero complications around the world for decades.

    So, no, the virus is not a scam, and I challenge people routinely who suggest that it is. The scam I referenced was that the pandemic was not spontaneous in nature, but rather it was designed by the cooperation of medical and bureaucratic malfeasance which has killed so many good people, people who had between weeks and decades of life stolen from them. This is the scam of which I speak, and it is not a pretty claim to make, but neither is it made without evidence to support it.

    This is all but a short bit of the Covid Scam which was played against the public, but this is how it began and why you saw the hospitals overwhelmed. One thing which should be noted is that very few areas around the world are equipped with hospitals which can take on large numbers of patients at a single time. When many people show up at a single hospital, the overflow is diverted to a sister facility in the area, but when all the hospitals have such overflows at once, well, you saw what happened in Italy and elsewhere. Not only do the Covid patients, who should have been treated weeks earlier, die due to the lack of beds, but so too do those who require care as victims of disease, violence and poor health, all of which is quite endemic in our society. Just a point of clarity if you are unaware.

    As to the military involvement, it is a very interesting question for which we will see how well its claims stand the test of time, facts and reason, so color me speculative at this point. We will see.

  2. Peloni

    “So, was the entire Covid scam actually a big psyop designed by the military to manipulate the public into cooperating as military countermeasures in the form of the Covid shots were deployed on an unsuspecting public? ”

    Really is that really your position that this virus is all a scam?

    How do you explain the hospitals in Ireland unable to cope. The deaths of so many??? I am thinking here my own memory.

    Very extreme position???

  3. New documents show the cover-up is even WORSE than we thought
    30 min interview explaining the latest claim about the Covid Hoax.

    DOD CONTROLLED COVID ‘VACCINES’ FROM THE START UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM – LIED THE ENTIRE TIME – Were NEVER ‘Safe and Effective’

    So, was the entire Covid scam actually a big psyop designed by the military to manipulate the public into cooperating as military countermeasures in the form of the Covid shots were deployed on an unsuspecting public?

    Or is this another psyop designed to offer plausible deniability to everyone involved?

  4. The latest release of Twitter files demonstrates the degree to which the FBI pushed Twitter towards censoring the 2020 election. They paid Twitter $3.4 million for their services to censor the Hunter Biden Laptop and they arranged a war game six weeks before the 2020 election in anticipation that the Laptop story would break and how the media and social media would act to crush the story.

    Here is the latest Twitter File report :
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1604871630613753856.html

  5. My limited knowledge of US politics suggests that, if a private company becomes in effect an outlet for the dissemination of governmental views, it then becomes subject to the first amendment. Any hint of a possible law suit?

    Why this company’s collusion with governmental authorities should surprise anyone surprises me. All of the social media, I believe, are equally guilty. That is why I have never been, and will never be, a subscriber to any of them.

    I have ideas about how to deal with these companies; more accurately, their management. Unfortunately, my proposals would be frowned upon in our enlightened age although Torquemada would understand and approve.