Here’s How The CDC Used A Backchannel With Twitter To Control The COVID-19 Narrative

Twitter set up a portal for government officials and “stakeholders” to submit posts that allegedly contained COVID-19 misinformation for Twitter to review, according to documents released by America First Legal (AFL) on Tuesday.

Twitter officials used the portal to track online posts for review, and invited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials to enroll, according to documents AFL obtained through its litigation against the CDC. Twitter’s Todd O’Boyle enrolled the CDC’s Carol Crawford in the portal in May 2021 after she sent an email labeled “COVID Misinformation” with links to several Twitter posts who wrote about microchips and “vaccine shedding.” O’Boyle described the channel as “the best way to get a spreadsheet like this reviewed.”

O’Boyle wrote in his response that he agreed that her submissions were “important trends to note” and assured her Twitter would review them.

On Sept. 2, Crawford emailed O’Boyle that a CDC “Lab alert” regarding PCR testing was allegedly “misinterpreted and was shared via social media.” Crawford then flagged the hashtag “pcrtest” to be monitored.

Crawford also asked for Census Department officials to be able to use the Twitter portal to flag COVID-19 misinformation, according to the documents.

“Also, would there be any issues or complications stemming from flagging COVID misinformation on the portal using the existing census.gov accounts that have access?” Crawford wrote May 24.

“In recent months, millions of Americans have witnessed the peeling of the ‘misinformation’ onion. Beneath each layer of shocking details about a partnership between the federal government and Big Tech is yet another layer of connections, conspiracy, and collaboration between power centers that seek to suppress information from the American people,” Gene Hamilton, America First Legal vice-president and general counsel, said in Tuesday’s press release. “We are proud to play a leading role in fighting for the rights of all Americans and revealing this vital information to the American people.”

Tuesday’s announcement was the fourth set of documents AFL released about COVID-19 censorship. The other sets released by AFL revealed additional information about how the government censored information about the COVID-19 pandemic, “built the evidentiary record showing that CDC specifically sent Facebook and Twitter-specific posts to take down, throttle, censor, or flag,” and linked the CDC’s guidelines on in-school mask mandates to “political polling by liberal dark money group The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF),” according to the press release.

KFF “is a nonprofit organization focusing on national health issues, as well as the U.S. role in global health policy,” according to it website.

KFF received funding from platforms including Google and Twitter and its officials have served in both the Biden and Obama administrations, a November AFL press release claimed. Drew Altman, KFF president and CEO, claimed in an August 2021 email to Biden officials that mask mandates in school were popular and those who opposed the policy ” is “made up of the usual suspects” who are “large enough to make some trouble,” AFL revealed.

O’Boyle, Crawford, the CDC, the WHO, Facebook, Google, KFF and Twitter did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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