The Facebook ‘how-to’ manual on COVID censorship exposed after lawsuit

The onboarding documents that Facebook used to help new employees quickly delete posts that the government deemed unacceptable during the pandemic has been released.

The documents were turned over to attorneys at America First Legal (AFL), which is suing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the online censorship.

Among the revelations disclosed with the publication of the documents is that Facebook created an online portal specifically for the Department of Homeland Security that allowed the government to bypass record-keeping requirements.

The portal could only be accessed by federal government employees and law enforcement, and it allowed government workers to batch load up to 20 links of Facebook posts that they wanted deleted from the social media site, said AFL. 

The portal was titled “xtakedowns” on the Facebook hyperlink.  

Some of the documents previously were leaked to The Intercept, and published in 2022, and the rest were just published by America First Legal.  

Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a House Committee in August that the Biden-Harris administration, including the White House, “repeatedly pressured” the social media company for months to take down posts deemed misinformation, even those posts that were clearly humor or satire. 

“I think we made some choices that… we wouldn’t make today,” Zuckerberg said about the social media company’s response to the pressure.  

By moving the censorship requests from email records directly to an online portal controlled by Facebook, government officials were able to avoid having a record of the censorship requests available to the public. 

The on-boarding manual also shows that Facebook generated confirmation numbers for the government workers to be able to follow up with their demands for censorship. 

“These documents show – definitively– the architecture behind the systems that political appointees and governmental bureaucrats used to unconstitutionally censor the free speech of Americans online,” said Gene Hamilton, executive director of AFL. “The right to speak – to even question authority – is so fundamental to our national identity, yet in the name of a public health crisis, Biden Administration officials worked with major companies to silence dissent.” 

In May, the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a 98-page report alleging the Biden-Harris White House sought to “intentionally” distort public debate on COVID-19 policies, which had a devastating effect on public policy decisions. 

As a result of the censorship, the report said, “ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits. … Instead, policymakers implemented a series of public health measures that proved to be disastrous for the country.” 

Documents subpoenaed by the House committee from Facebook, Amazon, YouTube and others showed the companies caved to Biden-Harris demands for censorship under political pressure, said the report. 

The extent of the censorship pressure was first revealed after Elon Musk took over Twitter and publicly released internal documents that showed the great lengths that social media companies were willing to go to cozy up to the Biden-Harris team. 

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party,” said independent journalist Matt Taibbi, to whom Musk turned over some of the documents for publication.  

The recently revealed Facebook documents said that employees were only allowed to delete posts that health authorities had deemed contained “false” information about COVID-19, vaccines, or discouraged people from getting vaccinated for COVID-19.  

But America First Legal pointed out that much of the information that was claimed to be “false” by public health authorities was later shown to be true or at least plausible. 

Critics of the censorship have also emphasized that free speech is an absolute right in the U.S. Constitution, except in cases where someone is advocating physical violence to people. 

They warn that the COVID-19 censorship will lead to other forms of censorship. 

Earlier this month, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called for civil and criminal penalties for Americans who knowingly or unknowingly share what she called “misinformation.”