HOW THE CSC BECAME THE SPEECH POLICE: SECRET INTERNAL FACEBOOK EMAILS REVEAL THE FEDS' CAMPAIGN TO PRESSURE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES INTO BANNING COVID "MISINFORMATION.".

• Author: Soave, Robby

ANTHONY FAUCI, THE federal government's most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the longserving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was finally stepping down after nearly four decades on the job.

Ashish Jha, the Biden administration's coronavirus response coordinator, hailed Fauci as "the most important, consequential public servant in the United States in the last half century." White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described him as a near-constant "source of information and facts" for all Americans throughout the pandemic.

Indeed, the U.S. public's understanding of COVID-19--its virality, how to prevent its spread, and even where it comes from--was largely controlled by Fauci and bureaucrats like him, to a greater degree than most people realize. The federal government shaped the rules of online discussion in unprecedented and unnerving ways.

This has become much more obvious over the past few months, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Musk granted several independent journalists access to internal messages between the government and the platform's moderators, which demonstrate concerted efforts by various federal agencies--including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even the White House--to convince Twitter to restrict speech. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, are eye-opening.

But Twitter was hardly the only object of federal pressure. According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. "Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all," reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: "BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo."

These Facebook Files show that the platform responded with incredible deference. Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was "man-made" rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was "technically possible" but "extremely unlikely.") In other emails, Facebook asked: "For each of the following claims, which we've recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?"

The platforms may have thought they had little choice but to please the CDC, given the tremendous pressure to stamp out misinformation. This pressure came from no less an authority than President Joe Biden himself, who famously accused social media companies of "killing people" in a July 2021 speech.

Combating misinformation has remained a top goal for Fauci. The day after his final White House press conference, he sat for a seven-hour deposition conducted by Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in November). While the proceedings were closed to the public, courtroom participants say Fauci insisted that misinformation and disinformation were grave threats to public health, and that he had done his best to counteract them. (He also demanded that the court reporter wear a mask in his presence. Her allergies had given her the sniffles, she claimed.)

The deposition was part of Schmitt v. Biden, a lawsuit that accuses the federal government of improperly pushing private social media companies to restrict so-called misinformation relating to COVID-19. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, professors of medicine at Stanford University and Harvard University, respectively, have claimed that social media platforms repeatedly muzzled their opposition to lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public interest law firm that has joined the lawsuit, thinks the federal government's campaign to squelch contrarian coronavirus content was so vast as to effectively violate the First Amendment.

"What's at stake is the future of free speech in the technological age," says Jenin Younes, the group's litigation...