The newly revealed scope of collaboration between the feds and Big Tech in stamping out purported COVID-19 misinformation and promoting government narratives has opened a new chapter in constitutional challenges to state-influenced censorship by private actors.
On Wednesday night, America First Legal (AFL) published the first 286-page batch of emails among CDC, Google, Twitter and Meta staffers, some of whom were former Hill and White House aides. The production was compelled through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and typical of government document dumps, it’s not text-searchable.
The emails show intimate cooperation was well underway by the time the White House a year ago acknowledged the effort, which included thinly veiled threats for not more aggressively removing content.
New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney Jenin Younes told Just the News it incorporated “the revelations about the CDC emails” into a filing Thursday seeking to reopen its case against the feds on behalf of deplatformed users.
A federal court dismissed that litigation a month before a whistleblower leaked documents suggesting the Department of Homeland Security’s since-scrapped Disinformation Governance Board planned to “operationalize” its relationship with social media companies to remove content. NCLA cited those documents in its initial motion to reopen in June.
The document dump by AFL, led by former Trump White House senior advisor Stephen Miller, is also likely to help a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general against the feds for alleged collusion with Big Tech to censor information on COVID’s origins, Hunter Biden’s laptop and vote-by-mail security.
The feds filed a motion to dismiss two weeks ago for lack of legal standing and failure to state a claim. The AGs’ responses aren’t due until next week.
AFL’s documents show the CDC shared specific tweets and Facebook and Instagram posts as examples of content to remove, including an interview with a former Pfizer vice president, Michael Yeadon, who advised against taking “top up” vaccines, meaning boosters.
The agency inserted its own COVID recommendations into Google’s code, received $15 million in Facebook ad credits to promote its messaging, and even notified Facebook that Wyoming’s public health messages were getting throttled as misinformation.
Read more here at JusttheNews.com.