The ability of progressives to coordinate their efforts spontaneously across organizations has always seemed to me to be their chief strength. But it turns out that public-private censorship during the pandemic was partly due to explicit coordination between the CDC and the social-media networks.
Joseph Simonson reports at the Washington Free Beacon:
Over the course of at least six months, starting in December 2020, CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over “vaccine misinformation.” At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as “example posts.”
One funny detail is that once the CDC’s recommendations came in, they had the side effect of occasionally censoring guidelines and information released by individual state health departments.
The lesson that should be taken here — if it isn’t a dramatic diminishment of the CDC’s role in public life — is that the government should not try to help private censors, or encourage censorship at all across the media. But of course, the real lesson that progressives will take is that the CDC needs an entire department to centralize talking points and impose them on all public-health officials, and perhaps all doctors before beginning its campaign of censorship.